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Frazier, Nishani

Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism

University of Arkansas (Fayetteville)

2017



Nishani Frazier animates the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) around 1960s Cleveland through oral histories and public memory. An awesome feature of this book is that it also lives digitally through an online website that is itself a wealth of knowledge. Taken together, the book and its online supplements reframe the production of history while crafting a collective experience of understanding. Frazier emphasizes that CORE was inherently grassroots with “Its cell-like structure of local community groups [that] formed and then applied for membership to the national office.” It developed into what she terms “Black power populism” which “encapsulated socialist elements of wealth sharing that forced the American economic system to open its doors to more citizens.” This manifested as “Harambee, a Swahili word meaning pulling together and connoting the idea of self-help” in 1960s Cleveland. (see intro) When CORE made Cleveland an official target city, the community took this name. Frazier also emphasizes that activists pragmatically operated outside of CORE policies when necessary to forge local change. Organizational labels or infrastructure were leveraged when empowering, disregarded when not. Some “goal-oriented activists” used self-defense when needed (122). Local action also pushed national CORE policy adaptations, such as endorsement of Black power by 1966. Cleveland CORE was especially vital to housing rights, school equality, fair employment, and political education direct action struggle. By the late 1960s, it was also increasingly critical of capitalism and advocated for Black populism through economic cooperatives. Women directly led all of these movements.

BIG QUESTIONS:

  • What does the Cleveland CORE story reveal about interacting scales of activist organizing?

  • How do people adapt and reclaim social movement organizational structures to forge change?

FEATURE QUOTES:

  • “For me, oral history interviews were more than a compilation of facts, data, and proof. I’d seen how the philosophical transformation of CORE to black power worked its way into my mother and family’s personal, professional, and political lives—long after the organization’s demise. Black power was not a failure. Its lessons lived with them and in them long after CORE died. To understand their experience, you had to do more than speak to them. You had to hear. You had to know. And through it, I came to appreciate a different CORE.” (Preface)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS

  • Compare, contrast, and relate, w/ Baltimore CORE

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