This is a review of the Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, book edited by Dan Berger. It was just published in the Journal of American History. I contributed a chapter to it, basically the cliff note version of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times.
The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism. Ed. by Dan Berger. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. xiv, 303 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-8135-4873-9. Paper, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8135-4874-6.)
Stephanie Gilmore Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
When Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, his Chicago-based relationships with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers haunted him. As the media picked up on Wright’s black nationalist rhetoric and Ayers’s former association with the radical Weather Underground, the 1970s were revisited through those men and their associations with the man who would become the forty-fourth U.S. president. The contributors to The Hidden 1970s demonstrate that Wright and Ayers were hardly radical aberrations in an otherwise conservative era, but instead were part of a large undercurrent of deeply radical activism. The essays in Dan Berger’s finely edited collection showcase organizations and issues rarely discussed in mainstream historical analyses of the 1970s. Together they offer a fine, usable history of radical activisms that moves beyond the tired assumption that “identity politics” dissolved the Left and the radical activism of the 1960s.
The book is divided into three sections. The first focuses on insurgency as a metanarrative of the 1970s, and the authors address prison abolition, sexual assault, and land reclamation. Liz Samuel’s rich chapter on prison abolition stands out as a wonderful piece of scholarship that showcases black nationalist and white pacifist activists as part of the same movement against imprisonment and confinement. In fact, all of the chapters in this section underscore how shared fury among black, Native American, and white people was a hallmark of radical activism—and just as current radical antiracist activisms go largely unreported by the mainstream media, so too are those more distant efforts hidden from history.
Part two focuses readers on solidarity as the strategy for political advancement. Activists utilized global entities, such as the United Nations, to advance Native American sovereignty claims to land, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates in her chapter. Decolonization was also significant in the movement for an independent Puerto Rico (Meg Starr’s topic in her chapter) as well as the sixth Pan-African Congress in 1974 (the subject of Fanon Che Wilkins’s chapter). The authors do not shy away from the complicated realities of decolonization but instead underscore both the importance of articulating what seemed to be an impossible dream of global freedom and the grassroots work of activists who insisted that the rhetoric of “America” align with the nation’s actions.
Community is the theme for the third and final section of the book, where the authors explore how community bonds gave way to new political actions, ideas, and goals. Case studies of Chicanos fighting against police brutality in Texas (by Brian D. Behnken in his chapter) and white working-class people fighting against deindustrialization (in James Tracy’s chapter) illuminate how community was a geographical place and a political practice of resistance against the status quo. Of particular interest is Elizabeth Castle’s biographical chapter of Madonna Thunder Hawk, whose decades of radical activism across many issues serves as a keen and respectful reminder of the large number of people who engage in the hard work of community building.
The histories in this book should be chronicled in depth elsewhere, and scholars and activists have begun addressing the complicated and radical work underway on this era. For this new perspective on the history of the 1970s, Berger is to be commended. This decade is being taken more seriously by historians, and The Hidden 1970s offers an important intervention in the current narrative of the 1970s as an era of conservative backlash to the 1960s. Indeed, as the authors in this book make clear, the 1970s was a deeply radical time. I hope other scholars will take up this decade with the same ferocity and commitment shown by the authors here. I hope also that activists will read and draw inspiration from these histories of insurgency, solidarity, and community.
