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“BLACK WORLD VIEW”: THE INSTITUTE OF THE BLACK WORLD’S PROMOTION OF PRAGMATIC NATIONALISM, 1969–1974

In a January 1980 essay in the Black Collegian, historian Vincent Harding remembered the political activism of the early 1970s with regret and disappointment compared to the "inspiriting sense of collective action, transformative power, great victories, and tragic wounds" of the 1960s. And in a revised periodization, for this scholar-activist "the seventies" began with Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in April 1968. Harding noted that at the time of his death, King was questioning the political, social, economic, and moral foundations of American society. Dr. King's murder spurred tremendous activism, but the inability of social and political activists to make the profound societal changes they so desperately sought revealed the strengths of the entrenched corporate establishment. Harding acknowledged that these substantial obstacles "smashed our vague dreams up against the hard limitations of American structures." (1) Harding's frustrations stemmed from the partial victories of protest movements in the early 1970s and the eventual splintering of these movements by the decade's end. During the 1970s Black Power transformed civil rights activism, dispersing protests in various directions and seeking different solutions to the problem of achieving racial equality. The decade witnessed the growth and creation of numerous black organizations such as the Congress of African People, League of the Revolutionary Black Workers, and Malcolm X Liberation University that sought to expand and deepen the meaning of civil rights and Black Power for the 1970s. These groups provided depth and breadth to the ongoing social activism through involvement in the political arena, cultural affairs, unions and labor organizing, education, feminism, and other areas. Ideologically diverse, these organizations cooperated publicly in the early 1970s in the name of a hypothetical "black unity." Behind the scenes, however, black scholars and social activists were often wedded to particular ideological formations and the resulting divisions strained the well-publicized attempts at unity. (2) Despite these strained efforts, a unified front in attacking American structures and their inherent discrimination continued to be an aspiration for the freedom struggle in the early 1970s. The Atlanta-based Institute of the Black World (IBW) was one of many new black Institutions founded in the late 1960s in the various attempts to achieve to promote "black liberation." IBW was a collective of black scholar-activists and intellectuals, primarily under the leadership of Vincent Harding, that forged operational unity among the various ideological formations and camps within the black freedom struggle by emphasizing social, political, economic, and cultural analyses of American and African American society. IBW's associates, those affiliated artists and intellectuals, fostered unity within the group by adhering to a form of pragmatic nationalism, believing that flexible and carefully constructed social, political, and economic goals and strategies designed to improve black communities were more important than ideological pronouncements, conformity, and rigidity. (3) IBW's pragmatic nationalism differed from the cultural nationalism promoted by Maulana Karenga and Amiri Baraka, and shared by many black artists and college students, and focused on Africa and African peoples in the Diaspora. African-descended peoples have a "distinct aesthetic, sense of values, and communal ethos emerging from either, or both their contemporary folkways and continental African heritage." (4) Cultural nationalists differed ideologically from the revolutionary nationalists of the era who, according to literary historian James Smethurst, called for an "open engagement with Marxism" regarding the U.S. and global political economy, and pursued alternatives to the capitalist approach to economic development. (5) IBW's pragmatic nationalism was rooted in specific activities and issues such as the creation of Black Studies programs and the development of a "black political agenda" for the 1970s. …