Charles V. Hamilton, a self-described academic activist of the Black Power movement whose landmark 1967 manifesto with student organizer Stokely Carmichael reframed the civil rights struggle by calling on Black people to undermine America\u2019s \u201cinstitutional racism\u201d on their own terms, has died in Chicago at 94.<\/p>\n
The death on Nov. 18 \u2014 confirmed by his friend, South African professor Wilmot James \u2014 was only disclosed recently because of Dr. Hamilton\u2019s request for privacy. The news was first reported by the New York Times.<\/p>\n
Dr. Hamilton did not declare himself a militant or revolutionary, but his views often broke ranks with established groups such as the NAACP or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which sought broad political and multiracial coalitions. Dr. Hamilton increasingly stressed the imperative for Black communities and other minorities to take greater control of their own destinies.<\/p>\n
His encouragement of Black-led economic and social development \u2014 essentially building new systems alongside existing ones \u2014 was portrayed as a counterweight to the racism that he said was embedded in everything from bank lending to law enforcement. Dr. Hamilton\u2019s use of the term \u201cinstitutional racism,\u201d which he popularized, became part of the foundational statements for many Black nationalists and others.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis directly and specifically means the alleviation of Black dependency,\u201d Dr. Hamilton said at Harvard University in 1968. \u201cIt is incumbent upon Black people to control their own communities because, if they don\u2019t, somebody else will.\u201d<\/p>\n
That philosophy was the core of \u201cBlack Power: The Politics of Liberation,\u201d the 1967 book that brought together Dr. Hamilton from academia and Carmichael, a firebrand leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights group.<\/p>\n
The partnership was a study in contrasts. Dr. Hamilton was a pipe-smoking professor who eschewed bombast and often told his students to avoid angry rhetoric and abide by his oft-repeated appeal, \u201cshow me your data.\u201d Carmichael (who later took the name Kwame Ture) rose through civil rights street battles and was building alliances with the militant Black Panther Party.<\/p>\n
During a protest rally in Greenville, Miss., in 1966, Carmichael gave an electrifying speech in which he called for \u201cBlack power.\u201d He did not coin the term, but his speech thrust the idea of Black Power, and its many interpretations, into debates on the direction of the civil rights movement.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never wanted to be just a professor,\u201d Dr. Hamilton, who spent much of his career at Columbia University, told the Annual Review of Political Science in 2018. \u201cNo, that was not it. I wanted to turn my academic life into an activist one.\u201d<\/p>\n
The book \u201cBlack Power\u201d embraced the goal of nonviolence followed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others. The treatise, however, offered a different vision about how to confront racism and bigotry. Black communities, they wrote, needed to cultivate their own leadership and institutions to show they were equal partners in the country\u2019s future. \u201cBefore a group can enter the open society,\u201d they wrote, \u201cit must first close ranks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Black power, Dr. Hamilton told journalist Studs Terkel in a 1967 radio interview, was a \u201cdevelopmental process\u201d and an attempt to redress long-standing prejudices \u2014 not a call for separatism as some critics claimed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went to school, Mr. Terkel,\u201d Dr. Hamilton said in the interview. \u201cIt was called a school of slavery and a school of segregation. And the lessons were very clear. Let me state it as bluntly as possible: You hate yourself. You are supposed to hate yourself because you are a quote \u2018minority,\u2019 you are different. You are lazy, apathetic and so forth. And you pass out of this school and pass those lessons to the extent that you believe this, you see.\u201d<\/p>\n
The political climate in 1967 was tense enough that the book\u2019s publisher, Random House, asked for an author\u2019s statement that made clear the book\u2019s nonviolent intentions. In the note, \u201cBlack Power\u201d was described as a \u201cpolitical framework and ideology\u201d that proposed an alternative \u201cfor this society to work out its racial problems short of prolonged destructive guerrilla warfare.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Hamilton said \u201cBlack Power\u201d may have generated momentum for community groups, Black-owned companies and other grass-roots initiatives. Yet he often insisted that the ballot box was the real forum for lasting and profound changes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ultimate solutions to the problems of black people must come through political victories \u2014 Black political victories,\u201d said Dr. Hamilton, who worked as a ward-level organizer for Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley\u2019s Democratic machine and later as Democratic Party strategist in several election cycles including Jimmy Carter\u2019s successful presidential run in 1976.<\/p>\n
\u201cPolitical strategy \u2014 programs, if you will \u2014 don\u2019t come from books,\u201d Dr. Hamilton added. \u201cOur work may act as a catalyst to political strategizing. \u2026 Books alone aren\u2019t the answer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Charles Vernon Hamilton was born in Muskogee, Okla., on Oct. 19, 1929. His father was a car mechanic. His mother was a homemaker and moved with her children in 1935 to Chicago\u2019s South Side.<\/p>\n
As a teenager, he was introduced to the interplay of racial issues and politics in Gunnar Myrdal\u2019s \u201cAn American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy\u201d (1944). After President Harry S. Truman integrated the armed forces in 1948, he served in the military in the late 1940s.<\/p>\n
He received a degree in political science from Roosevelt University in Chicago in 1951, and a master\u2019s degree from the University of Chicago six years later. In 1958, he was hired to lecture at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), a historically Black college in Alabama. From the beginning, he seemed at odds with Tuskegee\u2019s traditions of avoiding politics and protests. His contract was not renewed in 1960.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnlike most Tuskegee professors, who always seemed so deferential toward the school\u2019s traditions, Hamilton was not afraid to discuss the civil rights movement or other controversial issues in class,\u201d wrote political scientist Wilbur C. Rich, who first encountered Dr. Hamilton while a student at Tuskegee.<\/p>\n
Dr. Hamilton received his doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago in 1964. He was on the faculty of several universities before taking a professorship in government and political science at Columbia in 1969. He retired in 1998.<\/p>\n
He wrote or co-authored more than a dozen books, including \u201cThe Bench and the Ballot\u201d (1973), which analyzed how various civil rights cases were handled by U.S. District Court judges in the South.<\/p>\n
Dr. Hamilton wrote a 1991 biography \u201cAdam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma,\u201d about the New York representative from Harlem who was ousted from the House for ethics violations in 1967 but was reelected. \u201cThe Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare Policies of Civil Rights Organizations\u201d (1997) was co-written with Dr. Hamilton\u2019s wife, Dona Cooper Hamilton, a professor at Lehman College in New York. She died in 2015.<\/p>\n
Survivors include a stepdaughter. His daughter, Carol, who was press secretary to Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown, was killed along with Brown and more than 30 others in a 1996 crash of an Air Force plane near Dubrovnik, Croatia.<\/p>\n
While Dr. Hamilton was at Tuskegee, the civil rights leader King planned a visit. But the institute\u2019s administrators were so fearful of unrest on campus that King was not allowed on the grounds for his speech, which he delivered at a nearby church.<\/p>\n
Dr. Hamilton was the only Tuskegee professor to attend. At the time, King was seen by many as an outsider whose tactics of nonviolent protest \u201cwould only stir up more trouble for Black people,\u201d Rich wrote.<\/p>\n
Dr. Hamilton saw a hero in King. He went onstage and posed together for a photo that he treasured all his life.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Charles V. Hamilton, a self-described academic activist of the Black Power movement whose landmark 1967 manifesto with student organizer Stokely Carmichael reframed the civil rights struggle by calling on Black people to undermine America\u2019s \u201cinstitutional racism\u201d on their own terms, has died in Chicago at 94. The death on Nov. 18 \u2014 confirmed by his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1428,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1427\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}