Red Emma’s

By developing theories that they could unite with community-organizing practices, these activist-intellectuals turned the focus of the grassroots movement for racial equality from Civil Rights to Black Power. Following the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, these Black Power activist-intellectuals were already positioned to harness the energy that emerged from the uprising and directed it into the city’s first citywide Black Power organization, the Citywide Citizens Action Committee.

Even as Black Power theories became dominant over Detroit’s grassroots movement, their influence faltered when they failed to develop community organizing practices corresponding to the lived experiences of Black Detroiters. Black Power Praxis reveals how the relationships between ideas, practices, leadership, material reality, and consciousness drove the historical development of Black Power. Ideal for readers curious about social movements, Detroit history, African American history, and African American Studies, the book sheds light on how, why, and when Detroit’s activist-intellectual leaders successfully showed everyday people how their power might be used in transformative ways.

Matt Birkhold is Co-Director of the Visionary Organizing Lab, a learning lab that supports people to experiment with creating self-reliant communities and dignity-affirming organizations. He is a cultural worker whose facilitation and teaching practices aim to connect people to their creative capacity to understand and transform the world. He has made three short films, facilitated community, project, and organizational visioning across the country, and supported organization to create transformative cultures. He is a sought after facilitator and groups and people he’s worked with have gone on to better understand their work, deepen it, and create dignity affirming cultures to support it. He lives in Baltimore with his partner of 14 years, loves house music, and has been involved in movements for over twenty years. He was born in the late 1970s, lived through the crack and aids epidemics, and was deeply shaped by the ways that the permanently transformed US culture. He also has a PhD in historical sociology.

Amaka Okechukwu is an interdisciplinary scholar engaged in research on social movements, race, Black communities, and public history. She is the Fannie Gaston-Johansson Associate Professor of Sociology & Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the the author of the awards-winning To FulFill These Rights: Political Struggle over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions (Columbia University Press 2019).