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New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975

New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975
By William L. Van Deburg

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The most comprehensive account available of the rise and fall of the Black Power Movement and of its dramatic transformation of both African-American and larger American culture. With a gift for storytelling and an ear for street talk, William Van Deburg chronicles a decade of deep change, from the armed struggles of the Black Panther party to the cultural nationalism of artists and writers creating a new aesthetic. Van Deburg contends that although its tactical gains were sometimes short-lived, the Black Power movement did succeed in making a revolution—one in culture and consciousness—that has changed the context of race in America.

"New Day in Babylon is an extremely intelligent synthesis, a densely textured evocation of one of American history's most revolutionary transformations in ethnic group consciousness."—Bob Blauner, New York Times

Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Outstanding Book Award, 1993

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #778159 in Books
  • Published on: 1993-11-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 388 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
To Van Deburg, the Black Power movement was not solely a political phenomenon that yielded minuscule gains for African Americans. It was "essentially cultural," a "collective thrust . . . toward racial pride, strength, and self-definition." Along with revolutionaries like the Black Panthers, community control activists and separatists, the movement included cultural nationalists such as Amiri Baraka (who later became a Marxist) and Maulana Ron Karenga. In fostering self-actualization, Black Power, in Van Deburg's telling, employed soul music, urban folktales, paintings, prison writings and comedy. Black novelists, playwrights and poets, rejecting definitions of aesthetic beauty they claimed were specific to whites, crafted "alternative formulations that were far more relevant to black people," contends the author, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin. This vigorous, impassioned study sifts through the cultural legacy of the Black Power movement for a new generation seeking racial equality and identity. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s was an adaptive, broad, cultural movement that advanced African American self-definition and became a lasting influence on the entire American way of life, explains historian Van Deburg. In place of the mass media's portrayal of an extremist fringe of fly-by-night groups sloganeering for dead-end goals, he brilliantly illuminates a central, solid, multidimensional movement with deep historical roots and wide appeal among blacks. It reached out in folkways, language, the literary and performing arts, and religion, he shows. Extending the critical approach of his Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture (Univ. of Wisconsin Pr., 1984), Van Deburg moves to the cutting edge of explaining culture's role in filtering U.S. history as he clarifies Black Power's shape and size and its presence in much that Americans now see and hear daily. Highly recommended for collections on blacks, cultural history, or recent America.
- Thomas J. Davis, Univ. at Buffalo, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.