Book Talk (11/6): Dr. Leonard Moore to Discuss The Defeat of Black Power

On Tuesday, November 6th from 1 - 2:30 pm, Dr. Leonard N. Moore, Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement and the George Littlefield Professor of American History at The University of Texas at Austin, will discuss his new book, The Defeat of Black Power: Civil Rights and the National Black Political Convention of 1972 (2018). This event is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and is free and open to the public. Lunch will be served.Please register at the talk's eventbrite page. The event will take place in Bass Lecture Hall at the LBJ School.Here's a synopsis of The Defeat of Black Power from the event page:"For three days in 1972 in Gary, Indiana, eight thousand American civil rights activists and Black Power leaders gathered at the National Black Political Convention, hoping to end a years-long feud that divided black America into two distinct camps: integrationists and separatists. While some form of this rift existed within black politics long before the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his death―and the power vacuum it created―heightened tensions between the two groups, and convention leaders sought to merge these competing ideologies into a national, unified call to action. What followed, however, effectively crippled the Black Power movement and fundamentally altered the political strategy of civil rights proponents. In The Defeat of Black Power, Moore shows how the 1972 convention signaled a turning point for the Black Power movement, whose leaders did not hold elective office and were now effectively barred access to the levers of social and political power. Thereafter, their influence within black communities rapidly declined, leaving civil rights activists and elected officials holding the mantle of black political leadership in 1972 and beyond."