The standard narrative of black politics erases its radical internationalist and socialist streams

Evidence

No wonder the popular story of black politics in the twentieth century begins with the founding of the NAACP; makes a brief mention of the Harlem Renaissance; documents court cases that end with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision; and finally culminates with the civil rights movement, Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, and Obama’s election. It’s as if nothing happened in the 1930s and 1940s of significance; as if the radical elements of the 1960s and 1970s did not matter at all. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 407

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how the canonical civil rights timeline functions as a forgetting device that retroactively sanctifies black liberalism as the only authentic tradition.
• XREF: connects to: Black writers in this period engaged global imperial debates only from a nationalist standpoint — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 353