Nishani Frazier - Harambee City : the Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism.

Copyright 2017 by The University of Arkansas Press
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ISBN: 978-1-68226-018-0
e-ISBN: 978-1-61075-601-3
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The Wiz behind the Curtain

Nishani, isnt there something you want to say? Mere seconds passed before I said, Unh, no.

I sat on a panel session with other contributors to The Business of Black Power in Richmond, Virginia, at the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History. The books coeditor, Laura Hill, had asked that question. Initially, I was befuddled. Well, I suppose more like petulant. What had I not covered about my article on Cleveland and economic development that I should say now?

Consternation crossed Lauras face and she further prompted me, Nishani! You know about Frank Anderson. Lightning struck. I could feel my eyes beginning to roll. She meant for me to out myself as it were. You see, Frank Anderson is my uncle, and he features prominently in my article on community development in Cleveland, Ohio. Laura was not the first person to encourage me to tell on myself or rather revealing my relationship to the people who figure heavily in my work on CORE, Cleveland, and black power. Historian Sundiata Cha Jua reviewed earlier drafts of this book, and chastised me for not clearly outlining my use of oral history, explaining my relationship to the interviewees, or asserting myself more fully as the historical authority. My Miami University colleague at the time, Bill Meier, also noted his disappointment with the absence of an oral history analysis. All pushed me to further detail and critique this background as part of my history on CORE. I, however, was still petulant. Oral history was not the story I intended to tell. My family strongly influenced my work but hardly dictated my critical approach or its outcome. Family in an analytical history was still history, and I was no less the historian in the process. Yet with all the insistence that I explain my personal relations, I began to wonder had I somehow violated some unsaid historians code of ethics? Was it even possible to write what some might consider, though I did not, a family history while retaining professionalism or at least its appearance?

In part, my use and thinking about oral history provided some cover to this question. However, the presumption that oral history needed explanation also implied that it occupied some other space than what real historians doparticularly in handling better, read less subjective, sources. This, in spite of the fact that I could write a soliloquy on why newspapers and FBI papers were problematic sources for writing about the black freedom movement. Histories with family members had to be explained. Oral histories had to be explained. Accordingly, I was told often to address this in the introduction to my book. Possibly, my hardheaded refusal to engage these issues as concerning to the story underlay the occasional exasperated urgings and/or criticisms. However, it particularly bothered me that some verbose academic-eez might hamstring my introduction. The book was about the rise of black power and its ideological variants in CORE. As far as I was concerned, the introduction should reflect the book project.

Secondly, implicitly or explicitly, these conversations floated dangerously into questions of objectivity. Not that they suggested that I was a liar or overbearingly bias. It was that the presence of oral history and family somehow weighted my text more toward these questions than other historical sources or books. It was an idea repeated by history scholar Raymond Arsenault in his New York Times review of Beryl Satters Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America. Historians, he noted, who write about close friends or relatives do so at their peril. Personal engagement, so essential to the memoir, can confound historical judgment and scholarly detachment, especially when family honor hangs in the balance.

These questions forced me to confront underlying and lingering beliefs that science-based history necessitated a distant viewpoint in writing history. But despite such warnings, part of me wished to stand stalwartly against this paradigm. After all, were not all historians likely to fall far from the obligatory goal of objectivity? Since, and even previous to, the publication of Peter Novicks That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question, the field questioned the idealistic expectation of texts unfettered by author frailty. Alternately, historical truth was attainable if scholars embraced impersonality, neutrality, dispassion, and nonpartisanship. Perhaps too lengthy a requirement list, academics reimagined these defining elements of history research and writing as scholarly detachment. The presumption then followed that scholarly detachment enabled impartial judgment, balance, and even-handedness.

As orderly as the idea sounded, it still made my eye twitch. It seemed to me, like a proverbial Wizard of Oz, historians used the curtain of scholarly detachment to cover and hide exercises of identity and power not at all detached. We operate within chronological, political, and cultural contexts and so did/do our sources.

I had not purposefully intended to deny that personal and professional circumstances greatly affected my choice of subject, relationship to the subject, and approach in framing the subject. I saw this information as important but not in a way that obligated me to question this narrative or my historical voice. As a historian, I was trained to construct a reasoned, evidenced-based book. Even if my identity was construed as baggage, I certainly was not the only one. A good many historians came with the same baggagethough mine perhaps weighed more.

I had within me many personas. I am the child of civil rights activists, a sixties black freedom movement scholar, and a public historian and archivist. Eventually, it occurred to me that Laura, Sundiata, and Brian had a point though perhaps not in the way they intended. These identities had found their way into this book, informed by my particular thought process despite my insistence that author identity echoed in all histories. Nevertheless, the key question was how had it entered the text. For me, this translated as epistemology and power, not scholarly detachment or oral history theory.

It was true that my parents experiences greatly directed my intellectual development. I am the child of activists. But, this statement did not fully incorporate the number of people or persons who entered my life and affected how I saw the world, past and present, especially with regard to the freedom movement. Many of them appear in the book and are considered relatives. Not all related by blood, they constitute part of the African American tradition of extended family. These persons include, in alphabetical order, Frank Anderson, Jay Arki, Herb Callendar (aka Makaza Kumanyika), Gordon Carey, Don Bean, Art Evans, Pauline Frazier, John Frazier, Tony Perot, Nate Smith, and Ruth Turner (Perot). These persons shared their lives and CORE background with me during my lifetime and formally in interviews, but not all agreed with the studys analysis, and none contributed to how I formulated a theoretical model for interpreting those experiences. I also maintained my proclivity not to interrupt the introduction with an explanation about them, as that section centers on why weve failed to see black power or the distinctive approaches to it within CORE.