Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Peter D. Blackmer, author of Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers
What inspired you to write this book?
The inspiration really came from my time as an intern at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture when I was an undergrad at Wagner College. When I wasn’t giving tours of exhibits, my supervisors often let me spend my time researching in the collections. I started learning about the 1964 Harlem Rebellion and decided to write my senior thesis on the causes behind it. The thesis grew into a dissertation as a PhD student in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst and evolved thanks in large part to the influence of Ernie Allen, John H. Bracey, Jr., Jim Smethurst, and Bill Strickland. I also met Robin D.G. Kelley there and he inspired me to shift my focus to how grassroots organizers were challenging systemic racism and fighting for liberation in the years preceding the rebellion.
Throughout the research, I was inspired by the stories I was learning of local people who challenged white supremacy in the nation’s largest city and fought to create a radically different world. I was also deeply influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement and the national uprisings in response to the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book?
I wrote much of this book during the Black Lives Matter movement and the uprisings in 2020 and was frequently struck by the parallels between the expansion of policing amidst demands for reform during both periods. While researching one and living in the other, both periods were teaching me about how politicians, police, and the media stoke fears of rising crime to manufacture consent for the expansion of policing to suppress dissent. When Black and Puerto Rican communities in Harlem organized against police violence, Mayor Wagner and the NYPD routinely used the local media to warn of rampant crime and civil unrest as a way to justify and gain popular support for clamping down on threats to the racist status quo. It’s the same playbook the federal government is currently using to send the National Guard and military into majority-Black and Latino/a communities today. And this expansion of policing—then and now—brings immediate collateral damage and lasting harm to working-class Black and Latino/a communities. But there is always resistance, and history offers us valuable lessons about how communities have organized to fight back against a racist police state through self-defense, mass disruption, and legal challenge to curb police power.
What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book?
Looking back to when I started this project, I’m surprised and deeply humbled by how many people I’ve met and relationships I’ve built through writing this book. From elders who were active during the Black Freedom Movement and shared their memories with me, to archivists who helped guide me through vast archival collections, to friends and colleagues who shared sources and reviewed drafts, this book was a communal effort despite how isolating the research and writing often felt. Thanks to an introduction from Komozi Woodard, who has been a generous mentor over the years, I was able to interview the iconic Movement organizer Gloria Richardson about her involvement in tenant organizing in Harlem and her affiliations with Jesse Gray and Malcolm X. Through Bill Strickland I got to know NSM organizer and Black Arts poet QR Hand, who shared some colorful stories when I visited him in Vallejo, CA about a razor-sharp speech he gave alongside Malcolm X in the spring of 1964. That speech—which is featured in the book—was one of the first sources I found at the Schomburg as an undergrad, so to be sitting in QR’s living room all those years later felt surreal.
What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?
One that I probably talk about the most is a night in July 1959, where a thousand Harlem residents surrounded the notorious 28th Precinct to demand the NYPD release a man named Charles Samuel who had tried to stop two white cops from assaulting a young Puerto Rican woman. When it seemed like people were about to storm the building, two state politicians and champion boxer Sugar Ray Robinson talked their way inside and negotiated to have Samuels released with reduced charges. What makes this action so significant is the timing of it. That same night, Mike Wallace’s infamous report on the Nation of Islam, “The Hate That Hate Produced,” aired on local television and introduced popular audiences to the NOI and Malcolm X. It was also the first day of the NAACP’s 50th Anniversary Convention in New York City and Robert F. Williams was in town to protest his suspension from the organization over his embrace of armed self-defense against racist violence in Monroe, North Carolina. Coming amidst rent strikes, school boycotts, and struggles against police brutality that summer, this mass act of self-defense shook city leaders and shaped the course of the Black Freedom Movement the dawn of the 1960s.
What’s next?
Now that I’ve taken a much-needed break from writing this summer (after working on this book for over a decade!), I’m getting back to work on my next book project, which is a history of the Northern Student Movement (NSM). Often described as a northern corollary to the better-known Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the NSM was an important vehicle for bringing college students off their campuses and into nearby communities as they joined the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s. I’ve gotten to know and interview many NSM veterans over the years and I often joke that I was roped into writing the book by the late Bill Strickland, who was a national director of NSM and my mentor at UMass, and Detroit NSM organizer Frank Joyce. It’s a fascinating history and I think the NSM’s evolution, impacts, and complexities will offer valuable lessons to activists and organizers, particularly in a moment where student organizing is once again at the fore of national political discourse.
In the meantime, though, I’m back in the classroom with my students at Eastern Michigan University, who impress and inspire me every day. I’m also continuing to work on Rise Up North, a digital humanities project that preserves and presents the histories of local Black freedom struggles in the North.
