Books like The Defeat of Black Power — picked by fans

Journalist Wil Haygood’s 1993 biography of U.S. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell is an engaging portrayal of perhaps the most well-known Black American who ever served in the U.S. Congress.

Haygood’s writing is vivid and moving. He captures the flamboyant and publicity-seeking congressman on Capitol Hill, challenging the segregationist members of his party, at home in Harlem, touring in his fancy sports cars, in his pulpit at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, preaching about civil rights and racism, and traveling to Paris and other foreign destinations, often accompanied by attractive young women staffers.

From his arrival in Congress in 1945 until the early 1960s, Powell stood virtually alone as a national Black figure in taking a no-compromise position on civil rights and in challenging racial bigotry. Haygood provides a penetrating look at an interesting and complex Black American leader during a turbulent era.

Robert C. Smith (1947-2023) was one of the most prolific political scientists who wrote about Black political leadership.

This book is a critical examination of national Black political leadership in the U.S. after the 1960s. Smith posits a thesis that after the Civil Rights Movement, Black Americans became incorporated into the Democratic Party, becoming a critical component of the party’s governing coalition. However, Smith maintains that Black political leadership also became much more mainstream, co-opted, and marginalized.

This book questions the extent to which Black Americans have made substantive policy gains since the 1960s and whether their incorporation into the political system has helped or hurt their capacity to press their demands on the political system.

Former Congressman William Clay, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, provides a historical look at Black members in the U.S. Congress from Reconstruction to 1992.

Until the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s Black members of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House had been the highest-ranking Black federal officials. However, we know very little about them. Historians have largely ignored Black members of Congress.

Clay’s book is especially useful because it is partly historical and participant-observation. He chronicles and documents the experiences of America’s first Black congressional representatives who served during Reconstruction.

Readers interested in Black congressional leadership during the 1960s through the early 1990s will glean a lot from Clay’s first-hand perspective on the formation of the Congressional Black Caucus, Richard Nixon, the 1972 National Black Political Convention, and the expansion and maturation of the Black congressional delegation.

This biography of Louis Martin, sometimes called the “Godfather of Black Politics,” provides a brilliant portrayal of a Black political leader who worked as a close adviser to three Democratic presidents.

Louis Martin was a journalist who worked for the Chicago Defender and in 1936 became founding editor of Detroit’s Michigan Chronicle. Martin was an activist journalist. In 1944, he moved to New York to work as publicity man for the Democratic National Committee. Martin never left Democratic Party politics. He worked in the White House as a close adviser for John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter.

Poinsett is a good storyteller. He explores what it was like for one of the first Black Americans to be close to power as a top aide in the White House to three U.S. presidents.

Now teaching at UT Austin after founding the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, Joseph recently wrote a twin biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. called The Sword and the Shield. His first published book, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour (2006), was a thriller; it helped shift the prevailing narrative of the core years of the Civil Rights era toward the essential legacies of Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, and other Black “radicals” whose contributions were too long willfully neglected.

My daughter and I read this book together which started a conversation about Rosa Parks, racism, and courage. We liked reading from a child’s perspective because it evoked deeper emotions and made it more relatable to my daughter. The ending beautifully articulated how our courage gives others hope that they can also be courageous. 

Walter White served as the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1931 until his death in 1955. A light-skinned Black man often mistaken for white, he used his appearance to infiltrate the white-supremacy power structure and then work for civil rights.

In his evocative autobiography, A Man Called White, White recounts how in 1941 he and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph pushed President Franklin Roosevelt to take a major step forward in the struggle for civil rights – creating the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC). It’s a gripping tale about an often-overlooked part of the civil rights movement

The FEPC worked to desegregate the war industries, a mission that reshaped American politics and set the Democratic Party on the path of becoming the party of civil rights.

Why We Can't Wait is an easy way to get into the psychology of MLK. It is a 1964 book by Martin Luther King Jr. about the nonviolent movement against racial segregation in the United States, and specifically the 1963 Birmingham campaign. The way it is written makes it understandable from a 1:1 perspective. I am connected to this because it helps a person be actionable in their own way about causes they care about. No frills, just action!

Poor Black farmers and sharecroppers lined the route of Martin Luther King’s famous march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965, an epic protest that drew thousands of white supporters and led to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act. Hasan Jeffries beautifully recaptures these local people’s struggle for political power and economic self-determination. This book made plain to me as has no other just why and where Black Power was the only option. Local people creatively won support from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and challenged Lowndes County’s courthouse cliques and agricultural committees, powerful agencies set up of, by, and for wealthy white planters under New Deal federal crop subsidy programs. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization was the original Black Panther Party that later inspired legions of local northern activists.

This is a complete history of the Black Panther party in the US—its origins, its leaders, its political struggles, its accomplishments and controversies, and its ultimate dissolution. The unique poetry of the Panthers’ public pronouncements—by Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and others—comes vividly to life, as people of color confront a world of limited horizons and thwarted desires. In my new novel, I meld these voices with the beat poetry of Allen Ginsberg (who was a central figure in the 1970s New Haven gathering).