Historian Alice Echols, Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California, opens Black Power, White Heat with the horrific 2020 police murder of George Floyd and describes the hundreds of racial justice demonstrations that took place in response, many of them majority white.
Some, including Nikole Hannah-Jones, saw the protests as a significant bellwether. “Unlike so many times in the past, in which Black people mostly marched and protested alone, a multiracial and multigenerational army braved a pandemic and took to the streets,” Hannah-Jones wrote in The 1619 Project, a 2021 book about the foundational role of slavery in US history. Others called the summer of 2020 a time of racial reckoning, a moment to declare that Black lives not only mattered, but that police racism threatened community wellbeing.
Echols does not contest these claims, but she goes deeper, delving into the ways that people of different races have collaborated throughout history, and homes in on cross-racial organizing during the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. She argues that their often shaky efforts continue to resonate and influence contemporary resistance, stoking the dream that “a beloved community” will one day overcome racism and hatred.
The book, part movement history and part social history, begins with 1964’s Freedom Summer, which brought nearly 1000 economically privileged and largely white college students to Mississippi to register Black voters. As a project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the registration drive was, for the most part, financed by a slew of white donors who ponied up cash for bail and legal fees when volunteers were arrested. They also paid for everything from rent to phones to office supplies so that SNCC’s field offices could remain operational. “Donors gave the movement a much larger imprint than it otherwise would have had,” Echols writes. It’s an important point.
And while the registration effort included mainstream liberals and radical activists who saw winning civil rights for people of color as part of a broader program of social change, Echols reports that these groups worked in tandem, at least for a time.
Later, however, splits began to occur over the efficacy of nonviolence and over the role white people could and should play in racial justice efforts. Among Black activists, the turn to nationalism included the formation of groups like the Black Panthers – which Echols writes were both heavily reliant on the expertise of white lawyers and cash donations from white supporters and simultaneously promoted the idea that white people should work within white communities to dismantle white supremacy. The latter position, she concludes, had a dramatic impact on the way racial justice organizing proceeded.
The resultant fractures were, perhaps, inevitable. But splits, aided and abetted by the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, (which was officially in place from 1956 until 1971) and organizational infiltration by agents hellbent on fomenting conflict between different activist groups and between different movement leaders, took a hefty toll on organizing.
Moreover, the role of mainstream media outlets in presenting groups like the Panthers as violent disrupters of domestic tranquility, rather than as community organizers working to feed hungry children and provide medical care to the indigent, is highlighted.
In addition, Echols spends considerable time deconstructing the enormous influence of neoconservative writer Tom Wolfe, who popularized the term ‘radical chic’ in 1970, using it to smear socially prominent and wealthy [read white] supporters of left-wing movements. “‘Radical Chic’ aimed to make campaigns for social justice, particularly multiracial ones, seem chimerical, wrongheaded, and ridiculous,” she writes, “Conservatives were quick to understand its significance…At a moment when cross-racial solidarity was on the ropes, ‘Radical Chic’ delivered the coup de grace.”
Wolfe’s diatribe against elite supporters of left-wing efforts was shaped by a 1970 fundraiser that brought 90 donors into the home of New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein and his activist wife, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein. The event–which Wolfe crashed–was intended to raise funds for the Panther 21, a group of Black Panthers indicted for conspiring to shoot police officers and bomb police stations, charges the Panthers denied and supporters deemed specious. After each of the arrested parties was slapped with a bail fee of $100,000, numerous white people, including many with money, protested the excessive charge.
For Wolfe, Panther Don Cox’s speech at the Bernstein bash was the height of absurdity, and in an article for New York Magazine, he lampooned the “white liberal masochism” he thought he’d seen.
“Soon,” Echold writes in Black Rage, White Heat, the radical chic trope became ubiquitous. “Radical chic was such a sensation that Farrar Straus and Giroux, Wolfe’s publisher, released the article in book form, alongside another Wolfe essay, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. The second essay offered a searing denunciation of “Black community activists (the Mau-Mau’ers) and white antipoverty bureaucrats (the Flak Catchers.)
Wolfe’s book sold well and played a decisive role in undercutting white support for both racial justice and broader social change. Nonetheless, Echols writes that “Wolfe’s work obscured the significance of Panthers courting liberals and of liberals questioning the dominant narratives about the Panthers. This is no small thing.”
But ignoring these factors benefited the right and allowed conservatives to glom onto radical chic as “organizing gold.” Railing against armchair radicals dovetailed with well-funded campaigns to roll back the gains of the 1960s. Building organizational infrastructure was key to this, with the formation of groups like The Heritage Foundation established to contest civil rights gains and push for alternatives to Black power. For its part, the white left sidestepped these efforts and instead focused on newly emergent issues, from stopping the Vietnam war to fighting for reproductive justice and gender equity.
Furthermore, the acquittal of the Panther 21 in 1972 convinced many white activists that racial justice had been won.
Now, more than five decades later, the residue of Wolfe’s backlash remains potent. To wit: The right wing continues to lambaste “the liberal elite,” and Trump continues to invoke the specter of “radical left lunatics” in his speeches.
Progressives, of course, have always denounced these characterizations. But as Echols writes in the book’s Afterward, it’s high time to pay attention to what civil rights activist, teacher, and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon said about the difficult, painstaking, and necessary work of organizing across racial, gender, ethnic, and class differences: “You don’t go into coalition because you like it. You do it because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive.”
Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic, By Alice Echols
Oxford University Press, 495 pages
$29.99. Release date: January 20, 2026.
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