Prometheus 6

(Joseph will deliver a public reading from the book at on Tuesday, November 7, at 4:00 pm in the Melville Library’s Javits Room.)

Not Just Black and White:
Peniel Joseph's acclaimed new book recaptures the nuances of Black Power

The complex realities of the Civil Rights struggle are rapidly fading into myth. While real-life heroes like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are repackaged as cardboard saints, the fiery radicals of the Black Power movement — Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Stony Brook's own Amiri Baraka — are routinely denigrated, ridiculed, or ignored.

Peniel Joseph wants to change that. "We're fed a conventional version of the period that's preachy and unthreatening," says Joseph, an assistant professor in Stony Brook's Africana Studies department. "Students realize it's supposed to be good for them, so naturally it's dull — like spinach or broccoli."

That's why Joseph, a '93 Stony Brook alum, is on a mission to recapture the true flavors of a turbulent and controversial era. His new history of the Black Power movement, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour, is a major reassessment of the period that's drawn raves from Manning Marable, Robin D.G. Kelley, and other leading lights of African-American studies.

(Joseph will deliver a public reading from the book at on Tuesday, November 7, at 4:00 pm in the Melville Library’s Javits Room.)

Fluently written and meticulously researched, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour demands our attention. It's a bracing piece of narrative history and a vigorous challenge to conventional wisdom.