Joseph, Peniel. Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Henry Hold and Co., 2006.

Summary
Joseph’s Waiting for the Midnight Hour reconsiders the story of the Black Power Movement, one that traces its origins to Stokley Carmichael’s defiant declaration in June 1966. Its reinterpretation, he argues, helps us better understand how Black Power revised black identity and “transformed America’s racial, social, and political landscape.” (xiv). After WWII, black power emerged in the “space between new rights and unclaimed freedoms” with marginal radicals (Harold Cruse, Malcolm X, etc.) who were both inspired and repulsed by civil rights struggles. These activists tied local struggles with international events and laid the groundwork for what became the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. (6) Joseph details through figures as Malcolm X, Alber Cleag, and Robert F. Williams how the specter of armed self-defense was always hiding in the shadows of the civil rights movement. These figures shaped an ideology that “promoted self-reliance, self-defense, pan-Africanism, internationalism, and cooperation among blacks – and, at times, violence and misogyny.” (303) The Meredith March in 1966 brought this out through the public witness of Stokley Carmichael. Joseph concludes: “Inspired in part by the same legacy that buoyed civil rights activists, Black Power advocates took the notion of righting historical wrong to a whole new, if also more combative, level.” (302) Over time, Black Power activists, like their civil right counterparts, discovered that there were no easy solutions to America’s racial problems.