Errol Henderson’s The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized presents a substantial analysis of Black Power organizations (BPOs), one that begins with a critical appraisal of Malcolm X, the movement’s major ideological personification and symbolic intellectual and inspirational leader. Henderson focuses on the ideological formulations that Malcolm X articulated between 1963 and 1965, before and after his break with the Nation of Islam (NOI) and its leader Elijah Muhammad. Certain Black Power exponents took up Malcolm X’s late thought and attempted to forge a new secular Black solidarity movement and religious program, appealing to his contemporaries and the emergent generation in the early 1960s. Black Power movement “revolutionists” in key cities throughout the United States took responsibility for building on the revolutionary implications of proto-Black Power theories of cultural and political revolution through Black cultural nationalism. For Henderson, these revolutionists, in turn, not only misread the revolutionary political implications of their American circumstances as part of broader international developments, but also did so by duplicating the “reverse civilizationist” cultural perspective of Malcolm X himself. Henderson defines “reverse civilizationism” along the lines negotiated between the competing interpretations of Black nationalism offered in historians Sterling Stuckey’s and Wilson Jeremiah Moses’s studies of Black nationalism, slave culture, slave insurrections, religion, and sources of Black culture in the United States. These analyses in turn build on and against nineteenth-century notions of African underdevelopment, backwardness, tribalism, and the effects of Negro Christian missions on their un-Christian African cousins led by Christian Black nationalists. The revolutionists in turn leave on the ideological floor an array of proto- and preexistent theoretical orientations that privileged the raw material of Afro American culture, labor relations, class structures, religiosity, and war histories and that were readily available.

This book traces the Black cultural revolution across three major eras in Black cultural and political development: the antebellum period, the post–World War I period, and the Black Power period. Culture is defined broadly in the text as “a system of shared beliefs, traditions, customs, practices, techniques, values, symbols and artifacts and material production associated with a particular group, organization, or people…. One of the dynamic aspects of culture is its capacity, at times, to generate revolution” (pp. 137–38). Henderson recovers an original Du Boisian claim about the revolutionary implications of slave uprisings within the US Civil War with his interpretation of Black men with guns killing white men in several hundred actions and scores of battles (p. 97). For Henderson, nearly 200,000 liberated slaves and manumitted Negro men (and Harriet Tubman) in the U.S. Army represented an epoch of a “Black Revolution” within the “second American Revolution.”

The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized also builds on W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of the Civil War in Black Reconstruction and his posthumous publication, The Negro and Social Reconstruction (p. 96) as a “General Strike” of 300,000 plantation slaves from work and forced labor, understood as a form of revolution within a revolution. Black religion also matters in this book, as an organizing principle of many individuals that so impressed the agnostic Du Bois that this theory of revolution placed “the revolutionary consciousness” of slave peasants of the antebellum South above that of the European or Asian peasantry and working classes. The religiously motivated and catalyzed “General Strike” was a “slave revolt” that altered the course of war, fundamentally transforming the United States into experiencing a “second” birth with Lincoln at the helm, overturning the slave covenant of 1787, which was put to death at Gettysburg. The slave insurrection within the Civil War thesis was rejected by Du Bois’s academic peers, but Henderson, Barrington Moore, and Gerald Horne provide substantial support for the thesis of Civil War as Black revolution.

The book is dedicated to Henderson’s former University of Michigan professor, social theorist, and author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and Rebellion or Revolution, Harold Cruse, who looms as significantly as Malcolm X, Du Bois, and Alain Locke. Henderson is the rare Cruse student to read Black Power through protracted theoretical engagement with antecedent developments in the United States and not through European theory. The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized is bold in its sweeping thesis, and even more courageous in centering Cruse, shortly after the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) revealed the American academy’s general indifference to him. Henderson is sympathetic but critical of Cruse (as he is of Malcolm X) for producing social and cultural theory that “insufficiently focused on the cultural apparatus of the black community itself as a precursor to the broader struggle, insofar as it ignored the major black cultural institution, the Black Church” (p. xvii). Though Cruse alludes to Black “material and spiritual culture production” in concrete terms for cultural revolution, Henderson is critical of him for failing to theorize the endogenous knowledge that is on display throughout the movement and its antecedent stages. Henderson notes that “even advocates of cultural revolution often did not appreciate the revolutionary potential of black culture manifest in the religiously inspired working-class character of many black Americans who were mobilizing in the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) and the incipient Black Power Movement (BPM). Too often they argued that individuals had to abandon the church or repudiate their religious advocacy in order to engage in revolutionary struggle, which had emerged largely from initiatives of the Black Church” (p. 310). Black theology discourse might welcome the book’s implications for religion’s import in social science research and political theory, but trouble its undifferentiated conceptualization of the “Black Church” as a unit of analysis, where the nature of its Blackness and Protestant prerogatives, though obvious in the mainstream of the Black movement over time, is brought into question.

The Crusian framework of The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized, true to form, outlines a theory of Black revolution on the basis of “American exigencies” and conditions, rather than external developments or cultural awakenings. All of the thinkers whom Henderson draws on constructed theories of cultural and political revolution grounded in elements of continental US racial and ethnic politics. Henderson’s cultural revolution theoretical framework thus effectively synthesizes theories of cultural revolution that are part Du Boisian, part (Alain) Lockean, part Crusian, and is informed also by the writings and thought of Claudia Jones, Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, Harry Haywood, and Grace Lee and James Boggs. Yet the study reflects the imprint of Cruse above all and his critiques of the antecedent, contemporary, and Black Power generation articulations of cultural revolution.

“The necessity to understand Malcolm’s thesis on Black cultural revolution to comprehend the broader revolutionary theses of the BPM” prompted Henderson to “critically examine black nationalists’ engagement with black cultural revolutionary theory and practice” (p. x) in the book’s final three chapters (6–8) and conclusion. The book pivots to contemporary theorists of Black Power, revolution, culture, Black migration, capitalism, cities, and the Black church; it moves across the Black Power era, regions, and organizations that based their political and social movement principles on the ideas of Malcolm X. Henderson in turn excavates and theorizes with Cruse, but also accounts for the implications of Cruse’s political organizing among Harlem’s Black Panther Party and other nationalist circles, and in the Modern Black Political Convention movement in his writings and thought. It traces Cruse’s disappointment and move to cultural pluralism, when the cultural revolution was deemed a dead end, and considers writings that had gone largely ignored by Cruse’s Crisis critics, detractors, and admirers alike; for example, the serialized 1971 Black World publications, “Black and White: Outlines for the Next Stage,” which delineated Cruse’s applied cultural revolution theoretical formulations for Black Power era grassroots activism in a “theory of black cities” (and in demands for Black Studies education) during the movements (pp. 221–22, 231).

For Cruse—and Henderson—the black nationalist inversion and evasion misdirected the focus and energy of the Black Power movement away from its unresolved urban circumstances in the post–World War II period and from an informed interpretation based on plantation slavery to a theory of Black cities and Black studies that informed the multifarious regional or local issue-area concerns of Blacks. Each city’s revolutionists had built on the local ingredients of their own circumstances; for example, Detroit with its experience in labor struggle and the constitutionalism of Philadelphia Negroes (as far back as Richard Allen and Absalom Jones), which informed Philadelphia Black Power exponents. Similarly, the Black Panthers might tap the record of C. L. Dellums and A. Phillip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which won key battles against the Pullman Porters Union during the years of Huey P. Newton’s childhood in Oakland, California, over remote events elsewhere. Cruse’s Harlem-centric reading of the cultural revolution was not about Harlem per se, except that in its heyday so many Black Americans took their talents and dreams there and it represented the “cultural front” of the Black movement, given Harlem’s long history as a cultural epicenter.

For Cruse and Henderson, however, these “data” were lost and unrealized in the interregnum before Black Power, covering the Great Depression and World War II. How Booker T. Washington, for instance, related to Marcus Garvey and Malcom X’s Black power militancy was never sufficiently articulated. Instead, various militant organizations put their own desired emphases on “Malcolm ideology” or what they imagined was the “correct reading” of Malcolm X. Each had its own “Malcolm X” doctrine of cultural, revolutionary, and political theory.

Malcolm X was critical also for that part of the NOI made up of the two million American Black Sunni Muslims in the United States, led by his spiritual brother and American Sunni leader heir, Warith Huddin Muhammad. Moreover, multiple audiences heard Malcolm X’s crystalline criticisms of the “hypocrisy of American democracy” and views “that provided the theoretical and programmatic latticework of the major organization that generated and defined what became known as the Black Power movement (BPM)” (p. 2). These audiences included California incarcerated militants, nationalists, and Pan Africanists; Detroit area nationalists and organizations; Harlem nationalists; SNCC in Atlanta; Jackson, Mississippi; and Lowndes County, Alabama; the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW); the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church/Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit; the Congress of African Peoples; the Republic of New Africa; the Revolutionary Action Movement; the Black Panther Party; and Bay Area and Southern California radicals and nationalists, particularly on college campuses such as San Jose State University, Berkeley, UCLA, and San Francisco State.

Of these, Detroit’s LRBW comported most coherently with Henderson’s thesis of revolution, because it “incorporated in its revolutionary strategy a focus on organizing a national general strike, independent black unions, reparations, tenant rights, anti-police violence against black working class people, and labor relations in the industrial North” (p. xix). As well as the LRBW, Albert Cleage’s Shrine of the Black Madonna is exemplary as a representation of the Black Church in revolutionary discourse. The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized makes a signal intellectual and theoretical contribution to Black politics and Black political science, Black studies, Crusian Black Power theory, and political theory and political science. It is a substantial study of the Black Power movement.