The Blackstone Rangers

The premise of the more militant liberation movements of the 1960s was that there could be such a thing as Black power globally. The Black Panthers, who relied on symbols such as the Black fist and guns to communicate the seriousness of the pursuit of power for Black people, were just one of several groups who upended the nonviolent movement for civil rights in the United States. In “The Blackstone Rangers,” Brooks explores what it means once Black power is confined to territories.

Brooks portrays the Blackstone Rangers as an example of the failure of traditional politics to achieve the aims of the struggle for Black liberation. This failure is rooted in the ineffective response of traditional civil rights figures and organizations to conditions on the ground for working-class, urban people in cities like Chicago. Activists who should be a source of order and connection for people like the Blackstone Rangers are “the dupes of the downtown thing” (Line 8), meaning they have been co-opted by the traditional political stakeholders in the city of Chicago; worse, “their jobs were tied to their involvement in the maintenance of the machine” (Hampton, Henry, and Fayer, Steve. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s.