Reflections on Atlanta University Political Science

Adolph Reed, Ir.

New School for Social Research

Reflecting on Mack H. Jones's place in the political science profession leads, among other places, to reflection on the significance of the Atlanta University experience. Because he has been so centrally identified with that department, particularly in its formative years, the charge to take stock of Professor Jones's career provides a useful opportunity to consider the Atlanta department's relation to evolution of the study of black politics in particular and its impact on the discipline and the status of black people as practitioners and subject matter within it. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, the discursive center of gravity of black Americans' institutional encounter with political science as a discipline was set largely by the departments at Howard and Atlanta (later Clark Atlanta) Universities, which have been the only historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to award doctoral degrees in the field. Among black political scientists, practically regardless of subfield, these two departments seemed to define the voice of black political science. They have also historically dominated the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS), as faculty or graduates of those two departments have disproportionately served in the association's leadership since its founding in 1969. Reconstructing the Atlanta University experience, therefore, can help to illuminate the evolving relation of black politics, black political scientists and the political science discipline over the last three decades.

Taking account of the Atlanta University experience in this regard requires locating it in its ideological, intellectual and institutional contexts. First of all, the dominance of black power sensibility in black radicalism encouraged the search for a"black perspective" on politics and political science. Several aspects of black power, as both ideology and movement, enhanced this tendency.

Intellectually, black power's warrant to rethink American society, if not the world, from the standpoint of black people's interests impelled toward redefining and reconstructing knowledge as a political project. This project resonated especially with the black student movement that, during the late 1960s, became a key node in black power activism and the source of the call for black studies in the university. On campuses of HBCUs the demand to define, recognize and respond to distinctively black intellectual interests was not as simply reducible to a call for black studies. Many activists on black campuses argued, understandably, that the entire curriculum at such institutions should be sensitive to black people's distinctive needs and concerns, therefore rendering separate black studies programs superfluous. By the end of the 1960s, these forces at HBCUs had articulated the

236

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Save and Change BLick Schools movement, which sought radically to reform the focal concerns, organization and governance, and content of the historically black campuses.

Within the broader political science discipline, the ascendancy of behavioralism, the last generation's fetish of technique in the discipline's long pursuit of the fantastic goal of formulating the study of politics as an exact science-i.e., as quantitatively precise and depoliticized-was a significant current in relation to which the AU. program took shape. Behavioralism and pluralism, its interpretive expression in the American politics field, were, ironically, both foil and often unacknowledged conceptual backdrop for calls for an autonomous, more race-conscious and politically relevant black approach to political science.

Harold Cruse's critique of the prevailing interpretation of the trajectory of black political thought and practice also was a formative element inAU. political science's intellectual environment. In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual' Cruse radically revised the dominant understanding of the definitive tension driving black American politicaldebate for at least the previous century. The orthodoxy propounded most influentially by scholars such as August Meier and Howard Bretz/ saw black political thought as propelled by an enduring tension between a set of dyads, characterized either as a tension between programs of militancy versus programs of moderation or between advocates of protest versus advocates of accommodation. Cruse rejected those characterizations that sought the motors of black political controversy and action without reference to black Americans' affirmative aspirations. He proposed an alternative interpretation that retained the frame of recurring tension rooted in a transhistorical dyad. His construction, however, posited an axis of controversy that centered on the putatively independent goals of black political imagination. Specifically, Cruse reformulated the historical truth of black politics in terms of an enduring debate between integrationist and nationalist tendencies.

Cruse's formulation was especially powerful and influential as an intervention because it was embedded within the conceptual and rhetorical categories of black power sensibility, for which it provided an intellectual historiography. Cruse was a critic of black power activists' lack of theoretical coherence and superficial constructions of their pantheon of historical antecedents, but his critique was directed toward establishing a dialogue with black power advocates from within a shared commitment to elaborating, and buttressing an autonomous' race-conscious politics that was consistent with black power's underlying vision .

Institutionally, many black political scientists and political science graduate students were frustrated by the mainstream discipline's apparent resistance to accepting as fully legitimate either studying black politics or studying American politics (or foreign policy, international relations, comparative politics, political theory, public law or public administration' for that matter) from vantage points that seemed to resonate with, orto give space for, the concerns of black people, including black scholars. In fact, much of the mainstream study of black political activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s was straightjacketed by one of three externally driven narratives or tropes. One was the narrative of slow but steady progress or gradual integration. A second, rooted in response to the urban uprisings of the period, centered conceptually on the"why do they act that way" question. The third focused on identifying and characterizing styles of race leadership, without problematizing that notion itself by asking what exactly it meant to be a race leader. These three frames could and frequently enough did overlap, and they shared a disposition that failed to give space for consideration of what later would be called black political subjectivity.'

The inadequacyof the conventional approaches to the study of black politics became more prominent as an issue partly because the opening up of the discipline to blacks and

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Race and Democracy in the Americas

other nonwhite minorities created space for articulation of critical voices. This opening up of political science and other disciplines to previously unheard voices was fueled by the social dynamism of the time, which elevated progressive and egalitarian tendencies within the academy generally. This current led to creation of NCOBPS, the APSA's Committee on the Status of Blacks and similar caucuses and independent organizations within other disciplines. It was exemplified as well in the formation of the Caucus for a New Political Science and the elaboration of extensive critiques of the behavioralist orthodoxy's superficially apolitical, scientistic pretensions.' Ironically, behavioralism consolidated into a triumphalist orthodoxy at the same time as it demonstrated its inadequacies for addressing, much less explaining, the contemporaneous events and movements that were rocking the society.

As in other disciplines, increasing black presence in political science as a discipline and in its disciplinary associations partly also was an effect of increasing employment opportunities outside of HBCUs, as well as increased black graduate student presence at historically white institutions. Integration of those institutions, even on the limited and haphazard basis on which it occurred, moved black political scientists, at least structurally, nearer the discipline'S central conversations and debates. Thus, the social forces that enabled the Atlanta University experiment, and the creation of AU/Howard political science, also created the conditions for growth and proliferation of quite different orientations toward the relation of black people to the discipline, and different perspectives on the notion of a black political science.

It was in this context that the Ford Foundation was induced, under the initiative of Samuel Du Bois Cook, to commit resources to support creation of a Ph.D. awarding program in political science at Atlanta University, which previously had offered only M.A. level study, and to strengthen the existing doctoral program at Howard. The general mission of this initiative was to train political scientists in programs that were inflected toward distinctively black perspectives and concerns. To that extent, a presumption of at least openness toward activism-both intellectual and otherwise-was built into the initiative from the outset. Communication of such activist commitment certainly underlay the demand for a"black perspective on political science"that was the AU department's mantra. I hope it is not unduly provocative to suggest that evocation of the underlying commitment to activism was the basis of that slogan's real power; as I shall argue below, its meaning was always more affective than substantive. It was a metaphor that indicated a critical, if not insurgent, disposition toward politics, political science and their nexus.

Mack Jones's pursuit of a framework for the study of black politics, and the study of American politics from a black perspective, was an attempt to concretize this normative metaphor and formulate it as the basis for a research program." Leaving open for the moment whether that attempt succeeded or even could have succeeded, anchoring the department conceptually around articulation of that framework was rhetorically instrumental in establishing and sustaining AU political science's distinctive identity. The identity thus evoked resonated with the aspirations of those students and faculty who carne to the A.U department in hopes of reaching beyond the conceptual boundaries of narrow behavioralist orthodoxy and to link the study of political science to a larger political project.

Students-and I assume this to be true of faculty as well-chose to come to the A.U department for many, disparate reasons. For some, from undergraduate work at HBCUs, the program was a natural continuation at the graduate level of a preference for pursuit of higher education in a blackcontext. For some of these students, AU's appeal probably stemmed as much, if not more, from greater comfort with or commitment to the HBCU

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environment than from active desire for an alternative to mainstream political science's narrowness. For others, usually from white undergraduate institutions, the A.u. program sometimes seemed to carry an extra-intellectual weight as an idealized environment for merging into or creating a communal black experience. Occasionally, this motive seemed to conflict with, or to demand radical revision of, the form as well as content of the idea of graduate education, which presumes individualized work assignments and evaluation and a measure of hierarchy and regimentation in satisfying degree requirements. The program from the outset also drew a significant representation of international studentsfrom Palestine, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East as well as many from the Horn and sub-Saharan Africa. (It is an interesting tidbit to note that the department's second Ph.D. was awarded to a student from Poland.) What these students sought from matriculation no doubt varied in yet other ways as well, though many clearly expected that the program would maintain a less rigid boundary between the concerns of political science and the concerns of contemporary polities than was the norm in American political science. In any event, pursuit of critical alternatives to behavioralism was not the only, perhaps not even the primary, draw to the department.

Through the mid -1970s, the program included at least one or two people in each year's class who came directly from the frontlines of movement activism and organizing. That circumstance contributed to a departmental culture characterized by relative intellectual openness and lively political debate. For instance, I recall that the enrollment in Alex Willingham's Marxist theory seminar in the fall of 1973 was virtually identical with the leadership of the Atlanta chapter of the African Liberation Support Committee. I believe also that most of us in the program, at least the Americans, were intent on teaching only at HBCUs; that commitment in turn presumed possibilities for reforming the structure, governance and intellectual content of those institutions, in line with the spirit of the Save and Change Black Schools movement. However, combined with an insular departmental esprit, it may have fueled a less helpful tendency to exult in estrangement from the discipline's mainstream.

During the 1970s as weUthe city of Atlanta provided a unique natural laboratory for those interested in the transitions reshaping black American politics. In 1972 Andrew Young became the first black person elected to Congress in the South since Reconstruction. In the following year Maynard Jackson was elected mayor, along with black majorities on the city council and school board. Over the subsequent decade, it was possible in Atlanta to observe clearly and in the most mundane particulars the processes and institutional relations that evolved the forms and content of the new, post-segregation era black political regime, in both local and national politics." Nearby Paschal's coffee shop, for example, was the conventional morning haunt for the black political elite, where they did their most basic politicking and deal-cutting.

The department had an appropriately complex relationship to these currents reshaping black politics. They were of obvious academic interest, as is demonstrated by the number of master's theses and dissertations written on facets of Atlanta black politics during those years.' Mack Jones and other faculty and students wrote scholarly and commentary articles analyzing and critically dissecting the new black politics as it emerged. Bob Holmes, thenon the A.u. faculty, took engaged interest in the transition a step in a different direction by winning office in the state legislature. Individual faculty and students routinely worked in electoral campaigns, most characteristically for candidates understood to be populist insurgents. This link with electoral populist insurgency often may have been simply tautological, however. Because racial authenticity was the key critical category in the black power-inflected political rhetoric of the time, claiming populist

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identification was a pro forma legitimation for virtually every candidate and his or her supporters. One's candidate was by definition the people's candidate; otherwise, he or she had no justification for seeking office. Radicals typically gave their populists the additional garnish of claims to insurgency, as did others who were considered to be underdogs.

The department was engaged in still other ways in the two related political transitions that dominated 1970s Atlanta-the racial transition in local government and that to a new, post- Jim Crow and post- Voting Rights Act black politics. Some students followed career paths that led them into city, county or state government, or onto its fringes in what would later be called the" third sector/Some, mainly the activists associated with the African Liberation Support Committee and the other left political organizations of the time, attempted to swim actively against the tide of petit bourgeois consolidation as it was evolving. As the new black political regime consolidated, in fact, the activist element in and around the AU. political science department became the most visible residue in a shrinking pool of radical criticism and action in the city. Thus, when Mayor Jackson fired nearly two thousand striking, mostly black sanitation workers in 1977, practically the only consistent objection or protest to be heard from black Atlanta was that emanating from the department."

No actions or critiques that might have come out of the AU. political science department could have effectively countered or reversed the atrophy of activist mobilization that occurred over the 1970s. However, as the dust has settled to reveal more clearly the logic and content of the new black politics, it also has become somewhat easier to see important constraints, both internal to the program and external to it, that channeled and limited the AU. experiment and the significant contradictions, again both internal and external, that it had to negotiate. Those constraints and contradictions were both institutional and intellectual. Trying now to make sense of them and their impact on AU. political science may be useful not only for reflection on that experiment; doing so also may help to highlight significant features of the broader developments in relation to which the AU. experience took shape.

A key institutional constraint that was present from the beginningof the Atlanta University doctoral program was the department's ambivalent relations with Atlanta University and the other institutions in what soon would be formalized as the Atlanta University Center. Symbolically, the department's nerve center-its a.dministrative offices and reading room-was not located on the Atlanta University campus. Those offices were in a perfectly nice building, but one that was on the Morris Brown College campus, about as far away from the main AU. campus as any point within the five-institution complex. The university always seemed hesitant, if not decidedly lukewarm, in its commitment to the program. Neither did the central administration indicate that it appreciated the potential of a serious doctoral program; nor did it fully embrace its financial commitment to the department. The Ford grant was planned to phase out gradually in regular increments over seven years, with the university replacing each annual incremental reduction; however, the university administration temporized in honoring its commitment and only reluctantly approximated appropriate funding levels.

The university's reluctant commitment to the program no doubt stemmed partly from small-minded penuriousness. It may also have reflected a more widespread anxiety among faculty and administrations at the other institutions in the Atlanta University Center. It was apparent from very early in the department's history that many faculty and administrators at the other institutions viewed the program with circumspection. To some extent, their wariness was probably a reflex, an expression of a default mode in the institutional

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culture of HBCUs. Long decades of underfunding and shoestring budgets had combined with authoritarian governance to create an internal regime that enforced conformism and flaunted disregard for intellectual production and innovation. This regime encouraged pathologies that develop within impoverished tyrannies: suspicion of novelty, chronically demoralizing working conditions that reduced employment to toil and time-serving, infection of collegial life with petty jealousies. It was largely this regime that the Save and Change Black Schools movement sought to challenge.

Some of the wariness was no doubt ideological. From its origins the AU. program was associated with the image of abrasively unconventional, if not radical, ideological commitments. In the context of the time, bold assertion of a commitment to link intellectual activity explicitly to an insurgent race-conscious politics marked an academic program as embracing"militancy."Although by the end of the 1970s such assertions would become pro forma in black academic life, early in the decade they were sufficiently atypical as to provoke discomfiture among even many black colleagues.

AU. political science's elan did little to preempt that sort of reaction from others in the AU. Center. The department's self-image projected a sense of newly discovered Truth and urgent mission, characteristic of the hortatory rhetorical frame that emerged within black power discourse. This rhetorical style is a common feature of movements or intellectual tendencies that have attained some social traction; the feeling of historical momentum feeds the aspirations that support rhetorical self-confidence and urgency. In the case of AU. political science, this sensibility reinforced an ambivalent rhetorical relation to the political science discipline and encouraged an institutional self-perception of the department as a City on the Hill in black intellectual life. This view arguably provided fodder for others in the AU. Center who were inclined to snipe at the department for being self-righteous, if not politically dangerous or irresponsible. However, it is most likely that the exuberance increased the department's vulnerability in this regard only marginally.

A significant consequence of the lukewarm response the department received from elsewhere in the AU. Center was the failure of plans for formalizing relationships that would provide regular opportunities for advanced graduate students to teach as adjuncts or teaching fellows at the Uridergraduate institutions. Without such relationships the pattern of fellowship awards became problematic. While the department's basic graduate fellowships were competitive with other departments nationally, the fact that internal funding was available for students only during their first three years meant that funding possibilities disappeared just as students began to prepare for their dissertation research. This circumstance, which no doubt had seemed reasonable when it was assumed that advanced students would be able to teach at the other institutions, required many students to take full-time jobs while working on their dissertations. The result was that students often took longer to complete the program than they otherwise might have and may have contributed to attrition.

The department's ambivalent relation to the discipline, though understandable, also had contradictory entailments. On the one hand, as I have indicated, the A U. program's iconoclasm gave it a clear comparative advantage for recruiting in a pool of politically attentive students, and, I assume; faculty. The program's curriculum, course content and subfield organization all attested to its uniqueness within the discipline. In addition to the standard fare of Political Theory, American Politics, International Relations and Public Administration, the program's core subfields included African Politics, Comparative Politics and a separate field in Urban Politics. And, of course, the content of even the conventional fields was refreshingly unconventional; for example, the Comparative Politics field

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was sharply oriented to political economy of development, and Afro- American political and social thought was thoroughly integrated into the Political Theory field. Of course black politics was integrated into the American Politics field, and, instructively, there was no separate field in black American politics.

On the other hand, propagation of the sense of our uniqueness contributed to cultivating insularity, as the exuberance of youthfulness and black power rhetoric tended to inflate expectations concerning the department's mission. The political and intellectual radicalisms that had emerged within the black power lineage by the early 1970s were more elaborately theorized than the nonradical, centrist variants around which the new black political class was forming. However, the persisting commitment to an abstract, empirically naive notion of race pride as the core critical norm biased these radicalisms toward embrace of millennial and communitarian political ideals and a rhetoric of racial authenticity." Those radical strains'prominence in the department's consensual narrative of identity nurtured a local environment in which A.U. political science was cast as a solitary outpost of righteousness in an otherwise bankrupt and irrelevant discipline. (This sense no doubt fed the department's long-running rivalry with the Howard program for primacy in black political science. At the time the spirit of black radicalism also may have been influenced by the rivalry, with its tendencies toward sectarian"two-line"struggles.) Faculty did not encourage this simplistic insularity and actively sought to counter it, insisting that students familiarize themselves with the main lines of debate in the discipline and the techniques, theoretical constructs and core scholarship that constituted the mainstream. In particular, Mack Jones, as the department's most ardent defender of positivism and behavioralism, counseled repeatedly against ignoring mainstream scholarship and against simplistic, too sweeping anti-scientism. Faculty generally encouraged-in some cases, where necessary, even pressured-students to devise courses of study that at least genuflected to the realities of the profession and the structure of the academic labor market. However, these concerns to maintain moorings in the discipline and profession as they were existed in constant tension with the implications of the department's more elevated, and abstract sense of its mission.

The constraints and limitations that I have described here were at the time largely obscured in the afterglow of the fading political insurgency of the 1960s. In fact, the waning residues of that insurgency sustained an approach to political and intellectual life that, in its preferences for heroic formulations, tended to overlook or dismiss the mundane foundations of both political action and intellectual production. As the last glimmers of black power heroism dissipated into the demobilized black politics of the 1980s and 1990s, the inadequacies of that approach became clearer.

The key category on which A.u. political science's mission and identity rested, the claim to a black perspective on politics and.the political science discipline, proved incapable of generating either a distinctive body of scholarship or a critique and analysis that can make sense of the complexities of contemporary black politics. The black perspective notion actually never could carry the weight of either challenge. It was never able to specify how to choose between different programs or positions advocated by different black people. The only criteria available for adjudicating political differences within the discourse of the black perspective derived from the heroic rhetoric of authenticity. This could translate into nothing more substantial than assertions regarding which programs, positions or political actors most nearly conform to the requirements of an abstract struggle for"liberation,"which could also only be known by arbitrary assertion. As the lines of the new black politics congealed, such criteria have become less and less useful for making distinctions or judgments within black politics." .

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Similarly, the heroic intellectual focus on political criticism as A.u. political science's signature also has proven to be not especially productive. The hallmark skepticism toward elite behavior and official narratives remains a healthy intellectual stance. At a minimum, it helps to sustain an interpretive distance that can guard against the most simplistic presumptions of an unproblematic"black community interest. "The publication of Endarch, a student-produced journal of critical social theory, has left a permanent trace of some of the best and most exciting possibilities of this element of the department's identity." However, the changing terms of black political incorporation present us with new dynamics of change and continuity that require, first of all, a more finely grained descriptive scholarship than automatically follows from the heroic commitment to critique as an abstract principle or posture. That is, we need more than anything else in this field now a bodyof mundanely textured, empirically and historically thick and descriptive accounts of black politics because, as Professor Willie Legette (a product of A. U. political science) has deftly indicated,"the only thing that has not changed about black politics since the 1960s is howwe think about it.The field has not kept pace with its object. The righteous posture of critical pronouncement, despite its virtues, does not help us work through that conundrum.

This problem is made more acute because the study of black politics remains marginalized in the discipline, though in new ways. The most obvious, of course, is de facto ghettoization on white campuses, either in black studies programs or in what are in effect Jim Crow slots in political science departments. The greater, yet subtler marginalization occurs in the refusal to engage seriously with political activity among black people. This has been a chronic problem with respect to the study of black Americans in all fields. With the partial exceptions of history, literature and anthropology, in most disciplines only those who actually study features of black American life take it seriously. By taking it seriously I mean specifically, with respect to the black politics area, recognizing both that there are relatively autonomous, complex political dynamics that exist within black communities and among black people and that those dynamics are partly constitutive of the mainstream of American politics.

On both counts the record of our discipline is not good; non-specialists in black politics still typically operate with a notion of the boundaries of American politics that do not include accounts of black people at all. And the interpretive results often are worse when they try to pay attention than when they do not notice. They typically rehearse, even insist on, the most simplistic, potted understandings of politics among black people, as if the banalities of Time magazine or the New York Times are all that is required to make sense of black politics. These observations are not simply grousing. As mainstream programs have taken on a greater role in graduate education of scholars who purport to study black politics, their naive presumptions about black politics have become increasingly rooted in the sub field itself. As a result, the study of black politics, race relations and racial attitudes increasingly overlap, and the latter two threaten to displace the former. Within the black politics field, as projected in the discipline's main journals, as well as the hiring patterns of and dissertations produced from the most visible departments, the study of black attitudes and public opinion threatens to become the central discourse.

Of course, that work is as legitimate as any other scholarly program. The problem is that the methodological individualism from which the scholarship on attitudes and opinion proceeds leaves little space for attention to the actual practices of politics-the roles of political institutions, interest group activity, movements, public policy, dynamics of alliance and cleavage, the impact of political economy, practices of governance and the pursuit and exercise of power and public authority. To the extent that this approach be-

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comes dominant, therefore, we are left with a black politics field that, once again, neither provides accounts of political dynamics among black people nor even considers doing so. It is, moreover, a field that fails to ask the most crucial questions about any politics: Who gets what, when and how? Who benefits and who loses?

I should be clear that I am not suggesting that this is fundamentally, primarily, or most significantly a racial issue. Claiming the study of black politics for black scholars would have no necessary effect on the problem I have described. Nor do I wish to suggest that some fault line of authenticity or ideological correctness separates those who study black politics from attitudinal versus institutional or historicist approaches. As 1 have argued, not adequately conceptualizing the operation of political forces within black communities and among black people has been a characteristic limitation of the field since its inception." And, although it came nearer than any other identifiable tendency in the black politics field to breaking through the boundaries of that limitation, not even Atlanta University political science in its most dynamic first decade succeeded in grounding the study of black politics squarely and coherently on examination of politics among black people.

Again, it would be unreasonable to hold A.u. political science responsible for the ways that the field has developed over the last two decades. Not even in our moments of greatest exuberance-or hubris-in the early 1970s would it have been plausible to imagine that a small department on the discipline's fringes would be capable of stemming the currents that formed under the force of political demobilization and political and intellectual incorporation. As it stands, moreover, within the numerous cohorts of students who have gone through the program are many who sharpened and clarified their perspectives on the world in ways that 1 still believe would have been unlikely if they (1 should say''we," because I certainly count myself among this group) had matriculated at more conventional programs. I do suspect that our strain could have yet more impact on a field that certainly could use intellectual invigoration if we were to focus more systematically and carefully on engaging critically both the discipline'S mainstream and our own shibboleths and if we were to accept the challenge of creating a real grounding for the black politics

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1. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From Its Origins to the Present (New York:

Morrow, 1967).

2. August Meier, Negro Political Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960); Howard Bretz. "Introduction," in Howard Brotz (ed.), Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850-1920: Representative Texts, (New York: Basic, 1966).

3. I have discussed these tendencies in the study of black politics in Stirrings in the Jug: Black American Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 35-48.

4. See, for example, George G. Graham and George W. Carey (eds.), The Post-Behavioral Era:

Perspectives on Political Science (New York: David McKay, 1972) and William Connolly (ed.), The Bias of Pluralism (New York: Atherton, 1969).

5. For discussion of Jones's efforts to construct such a framework, see Robert Smith's article in this volume.

6. Stirrings in the Jug, pp. 3-9, and Robert C. Smith, "Black Power and the Transformation from Protest to Politics," Political Science Quarterly 96 (fall 1981): 431 -43.

7. Exemplary of these are Malcolm Suber, "The Internal Black Politics of Atlanta, Georgia, 1944-1969: An Analytic Study of Black Political Leadership and Organization" (M. A. thesis, Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia, 1975) and Claude W. Barnes,"Political Power

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and Economic Dependence: An Analysis of Atlanta's Black Urban Regime" (Ph.D. diss., Clark-Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia, 1991).

8. See Stirrings in the Jug, pp 5-6; Mack H. Jones,"Black Political Empowerment in Atlanta:

Myth and Reality," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 439 (Septernber 1978): 115, and Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1989), pp. 93 and 163.

9. See Cedric Johnson, "Dilemmas of Black Power Politics: The National Black Assembly, Race Leaders and Radicalism in the Post-Segregation Era,"unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 2001; Dean Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 70-103; Reed, Stirrings in the Jug, pp. 128-47; Robert Smith, We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post Civil Rights Era (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 75- 78.

10. Stirrings in the Jug, pp. 4-9.

11. Endarch originally survived for one full volume of four issues published over several years. Because it depended on voluntary student labor, it ceased publication when the founding cohort left the program. The journal has recently been resuscitated.

12. Stirrings in the Jug, pp. 29-49.