BLACK POWER, WHITE HEAT

A reassessment of interracial cooperation in the 1960s freedom movement.

Echols, a skilled writer whose previous works include Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (2010) and Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking (2017), undertakes a “substantive history of the interracial and cross-racial collaborations forged by Blacks and whites in the freedom movement of the sixties.” Echols opens with a case study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s shifting approach to interracial collaboration and then turns to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. An interrogation of Tom Wolfe’s 1970 essay, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” follows; she labels “Radical Chic” “perhaps the most enduring piece of writing from the sixties” and identifies it as a major source of ongoing critiques of white liberalism. The book concludes with a discussion of continuing cross-racial collaborations in courtrooms even after broader coalitions had fallen out of favor in the early 1970s. Echols argues, “Even if some of the people in my book were ‘awkward allies,’ clueless ‘comrades,’ and even dilettantes, their contributions made a difference.” That may be, but the impulse to better understand, if not vindicate, those who were well-intentioned leads to problematic moments. Echols declares “unconscionable” the Weathermen’s failure to take responsibility for a 1970 bombing that many assumed to be the work of the Black Panthers. But then follows, “Of course, if Weather was hoping to encourage Black people to start the revolution, why would they reveal their identity as the bombers?” This and similar moments effectively, if inadvertently, undermine critiques of real issues in interracial and cross-racial interactions. Echols acknowledges that she offers “no simple takeaways,” but the assessment that interracial and cross-racial collaborations “were thrilling and heartbreaking, effective and fraught,” leaves the reader wanting more.

A potentially enlightening examination of the value of solidarity politics falls short.