Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour

A Narrative History of Black Power in America

By: Peniel E. Joseph

Narrated by: Beresford Bennett

Length: 12 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

An acclaimed chronicler of the Civil Rights Movement, Peniel Joseph presents this sweeping overview of a key component of the struggle for racial equality: the Black Power movement. This is the story of the men and women who sacrificed so much to begin a more vocal and radical push for social change in the 1960s and 1970s.

©2006 Peniel E. Joseph (P)2007 Recorded Books

Critic reviews

"Vividly illuminates the personalities and politics of a turbulent time." (Kirkus Reviews)
"Once in a while a book comes along that projects the spirit of an era; this is one of them....Vibrant and expressive....A well-researched and well-written work." (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Great surface level analysis

If you read only one book about the civil rights movement, this might not be the best place to start. It offers surface level analysis which is only valuable if you are already familiar with the characters and events that take place. Much more valuable book once you’re familiar with MLK, Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver.

Wonderful at providing context

Fantastic historic timeline of the events and personalities of the Black Power Movement. The Movement is placed into detailed social, political, cultural and historical context providing amazing insight!

Decent Introduction, not thorough at all

Is there anything you would change about this book?

A book about Black Power that spends hardly any time on George Padmore, James Boggs, Franz Fanon or the Revolutionary Action Movements is pretty surprising. On the whole, this book is just barely deeper than the last chapter of most books on the civil rights movement. For the most part, the book focused on the big luminaries and their personal political trajectory rather than the practical application of Black Power in communities across the country. Why dedicate a chapter to Huey P Newton's trial, while barely touching on the work done by the BPP in the community.

This book is a great introduction to the casual reader who has no knowledge of the Black Power movement, but will be a very unsatisfactory read for any student of Black Power, Civil Rights, or the era in general.

Missing key figures.

To write a book about the black power movement and not even mention Assata Shukur is mind boggling. How do you mention Tupac Shakur and not his Aunt Assata? And Mumia Abu-Jamal, also absent. A very brief mention of Fred Hampton in regards to his assassination is a disservice. The BPP's stance on capitalism and imperialism was not explored nearly enough. Much more attention to the tremendously successful social programs implemented by the BPP was necessary. Also, COINTELPRO and its pivotal role was glossed over. Not enough time was given to the misogyny and patriarchy the Black Power movement was steeped in, as well as homophobia. Elaine Brown deserved more attention and Eldridge Cleaver less. His unapologetic stance on the women he raped should never be overlooked. What about MOVE? The book started out on the right path but veered off around the Black Panthers. The book ended up being a disappointment.

Excellent overview of under addressed era

There are far too few audiobooks addressing African-American history, especially those not focused on Dr. King and the mid 60s era. For me, who is coming to this genre with only general knowledge, it really whets my appetite for more. I was afraid that by calling it a "narrative history," that the author would more or less just link quotes together, but it is presented as a chronological history that is more helpful to novices such as myself. The author presents the material in a relatively objective manner, which adds to the book's accessibility. A very valuable work.

An important study of the Black Power Movement.

I was born in 1948. I lived through most of the history depicted in this book. Malcom X, Muhammad Ali, and Stokely Carmichael were 3 of my greatest inspirations. This book in my opinion is the most accurate and objective account of these events. Important listening for all who want to understand this era of African American history. R. H.

Poor editing

Book is good, but the editing is pretty poor. There are moments when the narrator is trying to figure out how to say a phrase that should have been edited out, and chapters just bleed into each other without any sort of pause.

bad editing. weak coverage

Is there anything you would change about this book?

There are audio mistakes left in the finished product. That's not the narrator's fault. The publisher shows a lack of professionalism here.

The author doesn't cover enough of the history of black power in America. A great deal is glossed over or simply missing.

Great Work Compelling in the Way It is Told

Outstanding history of the Black Power Movement the weaves the movement together without obscuring its diversity.

Editing not complete, but book worth reading

Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour is the third book I have read by Peniel Joseph, but it was Joseph's first book, published in 2006. And as you would expect from an academic historian, his books tend to concentrate on overlapping characters and eras. He is a historian of the mid-20th century civil rights era, concentrating on the Black Power movement. I recommend his biography of Stokley Carmichael and the joint biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

I purchased the kindle book Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour about four years ago but did not get around to reading it until I picked up the audiobook for free as part of the Audible member Plus catalog. The audiobook was not well edited. The narration was fine, but it felt like the editing was not complete. There were many places with long pauses where it appears that the narrator was intentionally putting in a pause for editing purposes that the editor did not remove. And one where the narrator took seven or eight attempts at a name before saying it correctly and naturally in context, and obviously, the editing should have removed that. There were other places where the audio had short repetitions.

Those editing errors (except for the pauses) were all in the book's first half. So I wonder if the audiobook editing influenced my complaints about the disjointedness of the book's first part. And that may be the case. But the book felt like it took a while to really come together. The earlier portions of the book were more context of the development of the Black Power movement, which was also the part of the story I was most familiar with. So again, I may have been influenced by being more interested in the later sections of the book, where I was mostly hearing history that I was less familiar with.

I had three main takeaways from the book. First, I think the development of the Black Power movement was significantly influenced by white backlash to the civil rights movement. Stokley Carmichael's use of Black Power during the 1966 march in Mississippi in response to the James Meredith shooting was not the term's first use. (Richard Wright had a book in 1954 titled Black Power, and others used the phrase before Carmichael, but it was Carmichael's use that popularized it.) By 1966, Brown v Board of Ed had been decided 12 years earlier, and much of the country was still segregated. The 1964 Civil Rights act (making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in restaurants or hotels, or other public settings) and the 1965 Voting Rights Act had both passed, but the march in Mississippi proved that the federal government was still reluctant to enforce the law. MLK Jr's assassination less than two years later gave further power to the frustrations of how civil rights were increasingly being thwarted through less overt means.

My second takeaway is that the Black Power movement had some level of sexism within the movement. SNCC, as an organization, identified sexism as a problem within traditional civil rights organizations early on. Ella Baker worked to design SNCC as a more egalitarian organization (both in gender and organizational structure) in response to the more authoritarian and leader-driven organizations like NAACP and SCLC. But as SNCC started to struggle internally, it appeared to become more oriented toward male leadership. Later, groups like the Black Panthers were even more hierarchical, and leaders like Huey Newton and Eldrige Cleaver were accused or convicted of rape. That is not to say that women were not involved in the Black Power movement or that it was an inherently sexist structure, but the sexism that did exist within the Black Power movement influenced the rise of Womanist thought as a reaction. Movements arise not just out of pure ideology but in response to events and as a reaction to earlier lines of thought.

Third, the cultural strength of Black Power as a set of ideals likely has had a more lasting impact than the organizations around the Black Power movement. The Black Panthers were not just about rejecting non-violence as the primary means of achieving civil rights but also about self-empowerment. There was an embrace of radical politics but also conservative ideas as well. And the role of the FBI and the federal and local governments actively planting agents to compromise the group's organizational structures and to create distrust among leaders played a role in weakening the sustainability of the organizations over the long term.

"Cointelpro would eventually include 360 operations designed to disrupt black nationalist organizing and, ultimately, would represent a watershed event in American history as it curtailed the FBI’s long-practiced policy of requiring a connection between domestic dissidents and foreign agents to justify bureau activity. Its secret war against Black Power activists would be marked by unprecedented abuses of federal power that featured the systematic, illegal harassment, imprisonment, and, at times, death, of black militants."

As with much of civil rights history, there has been a flattening of the history of the black power movement until it has become more caricature than nuanced history. Peneil Joseph has helpfully contextualized the black power movement, strengths and weaknesses, to help recover that transitional history from the earlier civil rights movement to the more recent history of a racialized United States.