Black radical scholarship grew directly out of activist movements

Evidence

Like Du Bois and the other subjects of his book, Robinson’s political work on behalf of Black liberation sent him to the library in search of the Black Radical Tradition. His ideas evolved directly out of the social movements in which he took part and the key social and political struggles that have come to define our era. For example, as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley during the mid-1960s, Robinson was active in the Afro-American Association, a radical nationalist student group based in California’s East Bay and led by Donald Warden. … Founded in 1962, the Association became the basis for the California chapter of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM); some of its members, including Huey Newton, went on to form the Black Panther Party. This small but militant group of Bay-area Black intellectuals drew many of their ideas from Malcolm X and other Black nationalists, and they were deeply influenced by revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. … Although they directed their attention to domestic problems such as urban poverty, racism, education, police brutality, and Black student struggles, they understood the African American condition through an analysis of global capitalism, imperialism, and Third World liberation. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 25

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Afro-American Association, RAM, and Black Panther Party lineage that parallels the organizational history of Black radicalism the reader is tracing.
• SEED: The Bay-Area radical nationalist pipeline from Donald Warden’s Association to Huey Newton’s Panthers is a tight organizational-history storyline worth an article.