Ep. 20 – The Black Power Movement and the Future of African American Intellectual History in the 21st Century: A Conversation with Dr. Ashley D. Farmer

[0:00:07 Peniel] Welcome to Race in Democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice and citizenship. Welcome to race and democracy. On today’s episode, we will be talking with Professor Ashley D. Farmer, a historian of black women’s history, intellectual history and radical politics, about the black power movement and really the future of African American intellectual history and black studies in the 21st century.

[0:00:43 Ashley] Hi, Thanks for having me here.

[0:00:45 Peniel] Well, welcome. Ashley, Um, actually is also one of my colleagues here. She is assistant professor of history and African American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and she’s the author of Remaking Black Power. How Black Women Transformed in Error, which is the first comprehensive study of black women’s intellectual production and activism during the black power era. And she is also co editor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition. So you’re very, very busy, Ashley.

[0:01:14 Ashley] I’m trying to just stay busy. Yes,

[0:01:17 Peniel] so my first question. I know you’ve been talking about this book for two or three years now. That’s a very important book, and I’ve actually taught this book in my black power. Graduate seminar is remaking black power. You know what inspired you to do this for? Research is, this comes out of, you know, your research that you did at Harvard when you were getting your PhD. But what inspired you to do this research? And, um what? When you think about this field and I’ve called black power studies What, um where do you feel the field is going? Because it’s there’s so much interesting work happening, so much generative work happening. So these air big questions. But my first, what inspired you, Teoh? Look at black women and black power. That’s a really seemingly controversial. So,

[0:02:08 Ashley] interestingly enough, it was the activists themselves that led me to it. I was actually taking a seminar in African American intellectual history, where I did a paper on the Third World Women’s Alliance which ended up being, you know, a big foundation of the last chapter of remaking black Power. And I interviewed the women in the Third World Women’s Alliance. Gwen Patton, you know who passed away recently? Francis Bill, who is also still very active. I’m writer and organizer. Um, and they were the ones that told me If you want to tell our story. You’ve got to go backwards. They saw themselves as the ideological and organizational heirs of the black radical tradition, ranging from, you know, the 19 fifties on. So it was that they’re kind of behest that I started to brought in my frame and think about how I could understand, um, black feminism and black women’s intellectualism in the broad and frame of black power. And I really realized there weren’t very many options. It was either, you know, women serving breakfast or there was Angela Davis. You know who I love and is wonderful, but it’s here and right and does right everything that you need to know about her. But what about, you know, kind of the everyday women that were part of major organizations? What about the women who we think where we kind of overlook? Because they were considered to be part of very patriarchal organizations. We shouldn’t discount their organizing or their intellect, you know, just because it isn’t so readily apparent. Um, so when I started writing this book, which was at the time my dissertation, there was really only your book and a few in a sprinkling of other articles, Posey, Weber’s book on black power studies. So it’s really quite amazing to see how the field has proliferated. Even in the time that I researched and wrote this one book, I think it’s going in really exciting directions. You see a lot more local grassroots studies now than you used to,

[0:03:52 Peniel] and I want you unpack. It’s a black power for our listeners, unpacked Black Power and also black radical tradition.

[0:03:58 Ashley] Okay, so when I’m talking about the black radical tradition I’m talking about, um, a brew, a range of intellectual thought that does not necessarily start in the 20th century. I would date it, you know, in the 17th 18th century, but primarily concerned with placing black people at the epicenter of an insurgent practice of kind of Uprooting the existing order, you know, so it means different things in different times. You know what what is constitutes. Radicalism means different things in different moments, but I think invested in black liberation and investing in kind of remaking the world with black liberation in mind. When I’m talking about black power, I’m also talking about ideology but also a movement. We think about black power more broadly. I think we’re talking about central tenets like self defense, self determination, community control. However, I think these things could be practiced, um, throughout the 20th century, but kind of get into a groundswell where there’s organizations and movements in, um, language and symbols around them in the sixties and seventies. So I’m kind of distinction between a larger ideology in an actual kind of concentrated movement of the late 20th.

[0:05:05 Peniel] Would you put the 19 fifties in there, too, in terms of black power? Me, I argue that what would you put the night?

[0:05:11 Ashley] Yes, I do. I think that I think that that is when you start to see people really laying the ground work in a different way. So I don’t see it as the same kind of organizing the folks were doing in the twenties thirties forties with Garvey is, um, in the Communist Party. And I see the people that were working in the fifties as really being either the leaders or sometimes the foundations of the sixties and seventies. And sometimes that meant that they were guiding younger radicals. Sometimes it meant that they were out there in the streets with them, thinking about somebody like a Louise Thompson Paterson. That was, you know, in both places. But, um, I do think I would say particularly after 55. You know, I would say that that you start to see a groundswell of black power

[0:05:47 Peniel] and the two people that come to mind for me or Lorraine Hansberry and Malcolm X, you know. So I get Lorraine Hansberry is really the founder what people call the black arts movement. And you can see it just in the writings. Certainly, Malcolm, as the activist intellectual.

[0:06:02 Ashley] Yeah. So Robert F. Williams, may Mallory also really great examples of folks that are doing that kind of, you know, an activism with a very kind of black power, but internationalist. But, you know, in that moment of McCarthy era, you know, repression as well.

[0:06:14 Peniel] Okay, so they’re talking about radical citizenship they’re talking about. Some people are talking about radical feminism, Marxism liberal. Integration is, um even when you connect that to this black intellectual tradition. One when you when I read your book, you really define intellectual broadly. So it’s not just the people who have got PhDs. It’s people who are, you know, Ah, Antonio Graham. She’s organic intellectuals as well, but also in cultural practices as well. So it’s people arts, you know? So talk to me about how you define and really exemplify in your work black women’s intellectual practices

[0:06:52 Ashley] s. So I think this was a really, really important question. So and one that again I was driven to buy the activist themselves. When sitting and talking and doing interviews to remaking black power, the activists would tell me, Oh, I wrote so and so or I drew this or I did this. And I can’t tell you how many times I had looked over something and I myself had overlooked to their contribution. And so you ask yourself, Why would you overlook that? It’s because you’re taught that evidence of intellectualism looks a very particular way, is usually a speech and editorial. A treaties. It’s certainly not our is certainly not. Satire is certainly not the women’s column of a book, um, or a newspaper Siri’s. So I really had to go back and look again. And when I did, I saw that what they were telling me was true was right where they said it was, and they were saying, you know, when I drew that picture. I was trying to say or convey, You know, these are the politics that we should aspire towards, and these are the people that should be involved. And that’s how you get. You know, artists like Gail Dixon, who who drew for the Black Panther newspaper, these wonderful depictions of women and hair rollers and domestic work also engaging internationalism and anti colonialism and politics. I think it’s also how you get great folks like Alice Childress, who uses a character like Mildred, a domestic worker, and really uses her to articulate a radical black internationalist politics. So it really in the book, I’m really trying to help people rethink What counts is an intellectual. What counts is intellectualism as a thing, and then think about the fact that if you know, racism and sexism exist and that bars black women from certain types of outlets, how do we think about and look about? Look for it differently in different terms of evidence?

[0:08:32 Peniel] So that leads me to my next question. When we think about what is going on in the field of black power studies in a lot of ways, it’s sort of mapping these different genealogies on some levels. It’s sort of an intersectional mapping, but also it becomes an interdisciplinary mapping because you think about race, class, gender, sexuality and people are starting to map that. But then you think about, um, one different disciplines and in different different themes the disciplines. I’m thinking about history, African American studies, but also sociology, anthropology, political science, law and society. But then the thematically I’m thinking about things like religion in black power. I’m thinking about things like the prison industrial complex and black power. So I want I want I want you to discuss What do you think in terms of the most, um, generative kind of work still needs to be done. What do you think is being done? Very well. What do you think there is? A posse, t, um, and this could connect whether we’re thinking about black power in terms of rural communities, um, urban communities where they were thinking about black power, bottom up or top down because that’s one of the things I always made an argument of that. And now we have books about black power and African American professionals who are sociologist or social workers. We have just a whole group of, you know, damn. Berger’s book on prisons. Robin Spencer’s were so many, and I think that this this this scholarship joins a conversation with this wider field of African American studies in African American history.

[0:10:10 Ashley] Yeah, um, things that I think are being done well, I think that there is far more. Like I said, interest in, um, the writings and activism of individual folks are starting to see readers come together. You stop just kind of pull their speeches out of nowhere. Now people are putting together readers that kind of allow you to see a given activist kind of range of thinking. I think we’re moving more towards biographies. There’s a historian named Mary Phillips who’s producing a boxy and Ericka Huggins, for example, um, which I think is good, particularly biographies of African American women. Um, I would love to Seymour um, kind of big national studies that don’t focus on big organizations. You know, it’s difficult because the archives that we have available are typically those big national organizations, but I think we see increasing evidence that there’s a lot of community without the rule, urban, um, expressions of black power where they’re taking national conversations and applying the very, very locally. Um, so I love to see more individualized studies of that, but also, um, you know, kind of a broader national scheme. Um, I think black power and education is moving, but I love to see it. More Russell referred of is he has a great book about the independent school movement. Um, but and there’s also, like, Abram Kendis book on. You know, the black power on campus in terms of how we get black studies beyond months is beyond his book. Yeah, um, but I think we are right for more local level studies about that, or how people, particularly not necessary, the college level, particularly the high school level, are doing that. There’s, ah, great woman named our Walker, who’s also writing about high school students in Detroit and which

[0:11:47 Peniel] is really Theo Harris and other people have written chapters on, but not a whole study. But what

[0:11:51 Ashley] do you

[0:11:51 Peniel] think? You know, one things here. I think you’re exactly right. But I think that we still don’t have great studies on the Black Panthers. We still don’t have definitive studies on Congress of racial equality we still don’t have. We have. We have classic studies on all these things and I love Waldo um, Martin and Josh Blooms, you know, black against Empire. But we still don’t have definitive histories of snick. You know I love Clay Carson’s book. Um, Andi, I love the new stuff Arkan Snick and Wesley Hogan’s work. But what do you think about that in terms of, even though these air very symbolic and sometimes we might say, is historians we have over emphasized tonight and I understand that critique. But do we really know in a granular way when August Meier and Elliot Road Wick study of core is still the best study? Of course, Brian Purnell has a great study Brooklyn core. But these air case. So what do you think?

[0:12:50 Ashley] I would love to see a comprehensive study, of course, especially because courts such an interesting group in the way it trans it moves from, you know, the freedom rides, you know, kind of early days into kind of a black power mindset. Um, I mean, I think this trouble is that they’re so you know, there’s so much variety and diversity that it would be I mean, probably a multi volume kind of scenario to be able to dio. But I would love to see one of snick. I’d love to see one about, um, core. I’m a little less invested in the Panther one Teoh. Why is that? Because there’s so many chapters I still think

[0:13:22 Peniel] we don’t. We don’t know what happened. And you could also have a ah black woman centred Panther study because so we see it with in some chapters of your book. But Robin Spencer’s book is very, very much and even, you know, Donna Merchant in her work. If you look at Panthers, especially after 1970 women are dominating running yet, we don’t know in a granular way what they did. We have snippets and great case studies, but

[0:13:52 Ashley] yeah, I mean, I would maybe be more invested in the women version of it. I just think that there is enough out there on the Panthers that you can pull it together. I don’t know that I need a ah conference of study. I also just think that I mean, from what I can tell in the work that I’ve done about the Panthers, like it’s so depending on where you are. You know what I mean? That I just don’t know. Um, if such a synthesis really makes sense in the same way, Yeah,

[0:14:14 Peniel] as a historian of black women, can you discuss like, what happens when we focus on black women? And how does it How does it forces to reframe sort of African American intellectual history on and also the writing of African American history?

[0:14:29 Ashley] I mean, so I think it helps us reframe in a couple of ways. I’m there’s there’s certainly a and A How should we idolize a couple of black women as the key thinkers? Yes, I’m usually those folks are educated, not exclusively or, you know, kind of, you know, prolific in their intellectual production. So, I mean, I think of everybody from like a Mary Church Toral, too. I mean, somebody like an Angela Davis there, people that we kind of hail as these icons and they’re wonderful and great, but it doesn’t give us much about how everyday black women just navigated these ideas. Which ones they thought which ones? They did it. And we kind of let the’s big kind of intellectual icon stand in for the thinking of an entire era, you know? So

[0:15:12 Peniel] what happens when we look at the black quotidian in terms of women?

[0:15:15 Ashley] Um, I think that you see, there’s a lot more pushback against things like respectability. Politics, I guess. What I see Respectability. Politics as both, um, a protest strategy and a means for survival. Right? So a protest strategy in the sense that if you know that you are being black people know they’re being held to white middle class standards. There’s a way in which you’re kind of better than them at it. You beat them at their own game, and you counter, you know, from the derogatory and demeaning ways in which white people view you would talk about you think about you. Um, it’s also, I think, a way of survival. Sometimes, um, you have Teoh fit in with what the status quo is to get from day to day to get the job. Teoh make money, you know, excited to get an education. Um, and so there’s the question there is. You know how much agency to people have in that kind of scenario in black women? I don’t think any black woman that I study. Even those who I think are very grounded and radical politics no sometimes dabble in respectability, politics when it suits you. But I’m very where you’re putting it on black women, as if they did not know what they were doing. And we’re not deploying it with that kind of level of agency. Um, but that being said, I think that, you know, press specially in the probably from 18 50 to 1950. That’s kind of the dominant frame from which we understand black women. It certainly black women intellectuals. And there has been some great studies that love the working class that show that that’s not the case. But I still think is the predominant, predominant image of black women. From that standpoint, I also think that you get to see all these spaces where black women theorize and produce when you look, you know. So it might be a mothers group, you know, and on and on the surface it looks like a mothers group, but they all are brought together over being politicized over, you know, treatment of a mother, the treatment of their kids in school, etcetera. And then they start to produce analyses of the world and pathways for thinking about how education, how child care, how marriages should look different. And that is a form of intellectual expression that I think we often overlook because it looks like a quote unquote mothers group. You know, um and so I’m very invested in thinking about all the different ways and all the different spaces we should think about black women producing knowledge. And that goes to a kind of overall goal that we’re not going to see black women strictly as a political anti intellectual, simply because they’re not engaging or producing knowledge in the ways that kind of fit the white, hetero, patriarchal standard in that way.

[0:17:36 Peniel] Okay, yeah, when you think about African American intellectual history, um, where do you see that going? And it’s convergences or divergence is with whether it’s black power or civil rights or African American labor history. And really, when you think about African American women’s intellectual history, sometimes that’s feminist. Sometimes it’s not. You know, sometimes people conflate those things. So where do you see? It

[0:18:02 Ashley] s so I think African American electoral history is having a renaissance, you know, it really is, um and I’m not entirely sure what accounts for that, but I like it. I

[0:18:12 Peniel] think I have something

[0:18:13 Ashley] like that I get, um But one of the things that is great about that field in particular is that it is getting diversified. And what do I mean by that? I mean that, um it is looking at people who are certainly working class, but it’s also looking at people outside of the United States and thinking about how they and their correspondents with African American shape, race and politics, both in America and in the world, I think it’s reaching back further, were kind of rethinking what it means to, um, being intellectual and also an enslaved person. You know, if you’re barred from reading, writing, what is your knowledge production look like? Um, and also, um, finding, uh, African American intellectual thought in spaces that are not completely black, You know, some mixed raced organizations and groups that people might have been a part of because that just might have been the best situation for them in that particular moment. Your comment about the conflation of feminism in black women’s intellectual history, um made me think that one of the things that we’re really lacking is great intellectual histories of conservative black women, you know, um, Leah Wright rigueur writes about the Republican Party, but we don’t have a lot of conversations about groups or individual thinkers that really fall on the conservative end of the spectrum, whatever that may mean for that given time. And it’s something that we really need to explore. If we’re invested in understanding black women’s thought in all of its complexities in all of its ranges

[0:19:33 Peniel] as well. I want to ask you about being, um, both of public intellectual and, you know, trying to organize younger groups of scholars, a younger generation Scotch thing about people like you, Keisha Blaine, even candy people I know and at times have have worked with as well, um, African American Intellectual History Society. What do you think the both opportunities are right now in 2019 and moving forward and some of the perils of doing that and sort of navigating our our way? Um, in the sort of ebony and ivory towers of the academy?

[0:20:13 Ashley] Um, you know, so one thing that’s great about the African American election, Mr Society, or I just as we kind of conceived of it is that it’s a space that’s not, um, that is committed to scholarly rigor around black people’s ideas broadly defined but doesn’t have to deal with the kind of, um, the ivory tower processes of getting information out there. You know, it’s very accessible. It allows us to have conversations across disciplines and time periods. And, you know, it’s up on the Internet for anybody to see for free, which is, you know, part of our goal in doing that. And it really came from us just having these conversations, you know, amongst ourselves and seeing the other people were doing this kind of block format and thought, you know, we could do that to, um, Chris Cameron, who founded it was really amazing in the vision for it. So the pro of it is that I think more people read by I just stuff then will ever read books, articles, etcetera. You know, it has a level of accessibility, um, than nothing. I’m gonna write in the academy Has that being said? I don’t think the academy has yet caught up toe how to deal with that part of somebody’s, um, kind of public profile and also somebody’s, you know, genre of stuff that they right. It’s not easily classified, um, in its difficult to kind of quantify in terms of impact,

[0:21:29 Peniel] but it certainly worked.

[0:21:31 Ashley] It certainly worked by every stretch of the matter. I do think that the economy is still struggling to figure out how to how to quantify that work and what that means for in the bounds of the academy outside of the academy. It leaves you open to ah lot. Um, there are There is not a week that passes where, you know, um, those of us who leave the organization aren’t dealing with somebody who thinks that it should be done differently. Um, and that you know, sometimes the those escalate Teoh rather serious issues sometimes. So it does leave you open to everybody having an opinion about what you wrote everybody thinking about what you should be writing, how everybody thinks you should be running the organization, etcetera. And sometimes that can really be an issue when it comes up to the academy, when you know people feel like there’s kind of a cognitive dissidents there,

[0:22:16 Peniel] but it’s really important in terms of institution building and going beyond ourselves. My final question is for students, for, um, you know, for listeners, for people were asked aspiring intellectuals, however, that might look. They might be artists. They’re just interested in ideas. What’s your advice for them? And why is the study of both black history but black women’s history so so important?

[0:22:43 Ashley] My advice would to be to read widely and read everything you know. Don’t limit yourself to a particular genre discipline. Um, anything like that. Everything that black people have and are producing can help really help Think about black intellectual history, but also brought in your sense of what intellectualism is. Um, and I forgot the last part of the question. Well, just

[0:23:06 Peniel] when you think about, um, why should we study? Yeah, why should we study? Not just black history, but a lot of your work? It’s focused on black women’s history, black women’s intellectual production. They’re theorizing. Why should we study that?

[0:23:20 Ashley] Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of a pat and dry answer, but it rings true. It’s just the people that are usually most depressed have really great solutions for how to get out of a mess, you know, Um I think that there is a lot swirling around tickly in this political climate where people wonder how we got to a certain place or don’t understand the powers that be or don’t understand the interest or, you know, players in particular decision law, etcetera. Um, and typically, if you go back and take a look at black history and black women’s history, there’s someone that’s been grappling with that for the better part of two centuries, but also offering you really a viable way. Ford. I often tell my students they want a playbook for the Revolution. All the time in the playbook is history, right? It’s it’s it’s. People have already done a lot of this work, thought about what’s wrong and test out some of the solutions to it. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t work, but you’re never starting for scratch if you have that kind of basis of understanding of how people have navigated it before,

[0:24:16 Peniel] so black women provide a playbook.

[0:24:18 Ashley] You are a blueprint for what? For possible ways or options in which you can move forward productively and, um, you know, imagining the world differently. All

[0:24:27 Peniel] right, so we’ll leave. It will end it there. Black women. Black women’s history helping us radically reimagine the world and the status quo. Thank you.

[0:24:37 Ashley] Thank you for having,

[0:24:38 Peniel] actually, Farmer, um, who is here at the University of Texas at Austin and whose latest book is Remaking Black Power. How Black Women Transformed an Era. And she is co editor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition. Both very important books which people should purchase. Thank you.

[0:24:57 Ashley] Thank you.

[0:24:58 Peniel] Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on Twitter at Peniel Joseph. That’s P-e-n-i-e-l  J-o-s-e-p-h and our Web site, CSRD.LBJ.utexas.edu and the Center for Study of Race and Democracy is on Facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal Arts Development Studio at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you.