Jessica Ann Levy — Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics (Politics and Culture in Modern America) - with Marcia Chatelain

Traces the rise of Black empowerment politics in the United States and Africa On a cold January day in 1964, civil rights minister turned entrepreneur Rev. Leon Howard Sullivan declared to a group of supporters gathered to witness the launch of Sullivan's latest venture, Opportunities Industrialization Centers, Inc., "The day has come when we must do more than protest--we must now also PREPARE and PRODUCE " Occasionally linked with the movement for Black Power, Sullivan and others, including Coca-Cola vice president Carl Ware and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, were in fact architects of Black empowerment--an intellectual and political movement that championed private enterprise as the key to Black people's prosperity.Jessica Ann Levy traces Black empowerment's rise in American politics--from early twentieth-century influences including Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey to the cities of postwar America into corporate boardrooms and government offices--and across the Atlantic Ocean to Africa. Civil rights leaders, Black entrepreneurs, white corporate executives, and government officials all championed Black empowerment as a means to address multiple crises in US cities and to blunt some of the more radical aspects of the Black Power movement. Black empowerment politics likewise found application overseas in various Cold War efforts to promote American-style free enterprise in Africa. This was especially the case in South Africa, where US corporate executives and government officials wielded Black empowerment politics to oppose apartheid and divestment.By the early twenty-first century, the idea that private enterprise, including small-scale entrepreneurs and large multinational corporations, should play a leading role in combating racial inequality and empowering Black and other marginalized people featured prominently in various policies and programs at the local, national, and international level. By tracing Black empowerment politics' evolution, Black Power, Inc. explains its popularity, championed by leaders from Bill Clinton to Nelson Mandela, while also revealing its role in expanding US corporate power, locally and globally.Jessica Ann Levy is Assistant Professor of History at Purchase College, State University of New York. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including from the Library of Congress Kluge Center, Jefferson Scholars Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Levy has written for The Washington Post, Black Perspectives, and Public Seminar, among other venues.Levy is in conversation with Marcia Chatelain, the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and a leading public voice on the history of race, education, and food culture. The author of South Side Girls and Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Chatelain is based in Philadelphia and Washington, DC.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781512828573?ic_referral=Iu7xgaZbRft2D_UZK4B1rl7xzpp_idwvopQ7Dk6TZQYwMyUQ1lqthCbHHUV4MJg15AR06i2G5xDSo_WqIvbwyf29FplomDSYEbf4CxLwPcjsn1tq2E6xW5RuS_PuJ5sirWZZOZo