Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

Peniel E. Joseph

Henry Holt and Company, Jul 25, 2006 - History - 399 pages

A gripping narrative that brings to life a legendary moment in American history: the birth, life, and death of the Black Power movement

With the rallying cry of “Black Power!” in 1966, a group of black activists, including Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton, turned their backs on Martin Luther King’s pacifism and, building on Malcolm X’s legacy, pioneered a radical new approach to the fight for equality. Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour is a history of the Black Power movement, that storied group of men and women who would become American icons of the struggle for racial equality.

Peniel E. Joseph traces the history of the men and women of the movement—many of them famous or infamous, others forgotten. Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour begins in Harlem in the 1950s, where, despite the Cold War’s hostile climate, black writers, artists, and activists built a new urban militancy that was the movement’s earliest incarnation. In a series of character-driven chapters, we witness the rise of Black Power groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers, and with them, on both coasts of the country, a fundamental change in the way Americans understood the unfinished business of racial equality and integration.

Drawing on original archival research and more than sixty original oral histories, this narrative history vividly invokes the way in which Black Power redefined black identity and culture and in the process redrew the landscape of American race relations.

What people are saying

Review: Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

User Review  - Eddy Allen - Goodreads

With the rallying cry of "Black Power!" in 1966, a group of black activists, including Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton, turned their backs on Martin Luther King's pacifism and, building on ...

Review: Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

User Review  - Alan Mills - Goodreads

The mythology of the civil rights movement taught in school goes something like this. We had slaves, that was bad. We fought the civil war and Lincoln freed the slaves, but some bad people in the ...

About the author

Peniel E. Joseph is an assistant professor of Africana studies at SUNY-Stony Brook. The recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Ford Foundation, his work has appeared in Souls, New Formations, and The Black Scholar, and he is editor of a forthcoming anthology on the Black Power movement. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America
• Author: Peniel E. Joseph
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Company, 2006
• ISBN: 0805075399, 9780805075397
• Length: 399 pages
• Subjects: History / General; History / United States / 20th Century; Political Science / Civil Rights; Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies