Abstract
“Olack Americans who believe in jobs rather than welfare; who want a piece of the action, not a part of the dole, who want a political leader who does not promise more than he can deliver, do have somewhere to go,” Floyd McKissick, the former national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and one of the nation’s most instantly recognizable faces of Black Power, told a group of African Americans in a fall 1972 campaign speech. The place he insisted they turn was to “the President of the United States, Mr. Nixon.” The story of McKissick and other conservative nationalists and black businessmen has been left out of almost all the scholarly literature on the conservative movement that arose in the 1960s; the conventional historiography suggests that Barry Goldwater and the Southern Strategy left the Republican Party a lily-white wasteland that was anathema to any self-respecting African American. Similarly, the traditional narrative of Black Power has tended to portray it as a movement exclusively of the radical Left.1
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Notes
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© 2012 Laura Jane Gifford and Daniel K. Williams
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Farrington, J.D. (2012). “Build, Baby, Build”. In: Gifford, L.J., Williams, D.K. (eds) The Right Side of the Sixties. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014795_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014795_4
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