With its intellectual roots tracing back to Marcus Garvey's efforts to promote self-determination and economic security in the 1920s, black nationalism attempted to promote community, identity, and economic power for African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Many adherents felt that African Americans would eventually have to found their own nation, rather than assimilate to American culture, which was predominantly white. The author discusses the origins of black nationalism, the politics of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South, and the Civil Rights movement, which ushered in an explosion of black pride, art, and critical theory. The volume also discusses the effects of black nationalism on popular culture then and now.