USA Africa Dialogue Series - The two nations of Black America: An Angela Davis Interview (1997)

INTERVIEWER: Your mentor, Herbert Marcuse once back in '58, as I recall, said that one of the things that would happen as blacks made gains in the civil rights movement was that there would be the creation of a black bourgeoisie and that's certainly been one of the things that's happened as we look back from the vantage point of 1997. How do you see the role of the black bourgeoisie in the continuing struggle?

DAVIS: Actually we've had a black bourgeoisie or the makings of a black bourgeoisie for many more decades.... if we look at one of our great leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois, he was associated with a very minuscule black bourgeoisie in the 19th century so this is not something that is substantively new although the numbers of black people who now count themselves among the black bourgeoisie certainly does make an enormous difference.

In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the US has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable. What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.

Read the full interview here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/interviews/davis.html

PS: Angela Davis.... As an idealistic hot-headed teenager in Nigeria, I remember reading her memoir and her work with the Soledad brothers. I was so smitten, that crush lasted for many decades... Good to see she's still going, this warrior...

 - Ikhide

 

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