The Black Preacher in America
Author:HAMILTON, Charles V.
Title:The Black Preacher in America
Publication:New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1972
Edition:First Edition
Description:First Printing, cloth issue. Octavo (21.5cm); gray paper and black cloth-covered boards, with titles stamped in white and gray on spine; dustjacket; [x],246pp. Gentle sunning to upper board edges, with mild tanning to text edges; Near Fine. Dustjacket is in fair shape with creases and tear near spine, lightly edgeworn, else a Very Good example. Signed by Charles V. Hamilton
Charles Vernon Hamilton was an American political scientist, civil rights leader, and the W. S. Sayre Professor of Government and Political Science at Columbia University.
First full-length work every published on the subject. "This book is about a figure who has been, and remains, one of the most praised and most condemned persons in American society: the black preacher" (from front flap). Touches on subjects little and widely-known, from Nat Turner to Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Somewhat uncommon in the cloth issue.
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Charles Vernon Hamilton (October 19, 1929 – November 18, 2023) was an American political scientist, civil rights leader, and the W. S. Sayre Professor of Government and Political Science at Columbia University.[1]
Biography
Hamilton was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma on October 19, 1929 and was the middle child between his elder brother Owen Hamilton Jr. and younger sister Lyna Hamilton- Williams.[2][3] His family moved to the southside of Chicago, Illinois in 1935, which is where he was raised. He had aspirations to be a journalist growing up, but he was dissuaded as, in his words, “there [weren't] many jobs for black people who want to be journalists.”[4] He went to Roosevelt University to study political science and graduated in 1951,[3] and went on to earn a masters degree in 1957 from the University of Chicago.[1] He joined the Tuskegee Institute faculty in 1958, but his contract there was terminated in 1960,[3] and he returned to the University of Chicago, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1964.[1] He held faculty positions at Rutgers University, Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), and Roosevelt University before joining the Columbia University faculty in 1969.[3] Hamilton retired from the Columbia faculty in 1998 and later moved to Chicago.
His most noted work is Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, written with Stokely Carmichael.[1][3]
Ellis Cashmore and James Jennings argue that Hamilton and Carmichael were the first to use the term institutional racism in a systematic fashion.[5]
Activism and Beliefs
Hamilton has said he never wanted to be a professor for its own sake, but for the cause of the advancement of black people in society. He wanted to be an “academic activist,” rather than a professor who was politically neutral. During his job as a professor, he was involved in activist groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which Kwame Ture was also a part of. According to his account, his activist attitudes and behavior are what caused him to be fired from universities including Tuskegee several times. In between his positions as a professor, he would return home to work at the post office to pay his bills. Additionally, he claims to have FBI reports that indicate that his coworkers at Tuskegee had identified him as a communist.[4] The FBI would later come to his house and tap his phone, which Hamilton consented to.[6] However, he has expressed dissatisfaction with Marxism for being class-reductionist and ignoring the issues of race that he has dedicated his life to.[4]
When Black Power: The Politics of Liberation was about to be published in 1967, Random House threatened to cancel the publishing of the book because of Kwame Ture's calls for revolution and association with Fidel Castro. Hamilton and Ture made a deal with Random House to publish the book with a message before the first page, which reads as follows:[4]
“This book presents a political framework and ideology which represents the last reasonable opportunity for this society to work out its racial problems short of prolonged destructive guerrilla warfare. That such violent warfare may be unavoidable is not herein denied. But if there is the slightest chance to avoid it, the politics of Black Power as described in this book is seen as the only viable hope.”[5]
After the Nixon presidency, Hamilton worked with the Democratic Party as a strategist. He proposed messaging he described as “deracialization,” which involves advocating for reforms that will address institutional racism without directly mentioning racism in order to avoid blowback from white people who did not believe that racism was an important issue. Because of this, he was criticized by black activists who believed that he was ignoring or downplaying issues of racial justice for money and/or status. Hamilton responded by saying that he was simply using deracialization as a means to the end of achieving racial justice through the electoral system.[4]
Ellis Cashmore and James Jennings argue that Hamilton and Carmichael were the first to use the term institutional racism in a systematic fashion.[5] Hamilton said he and Carmichael used this term to address the disconnect between the general (especially white) public's perception of racism and the everyday reality of systemic oppression that black people in the United States face. He explained it in this way in a November 21, 1967 interview with Studs Terkel:
“We went to school. It was called a school of slavery and a school of segregation. And the lessons were very clear. Let me state it as bluntly as possible: You hate yourself. You are supposed to hate yourself because you are a quote minority, you are different. You are lazy, apathetic, and so forth. And you pass out of this school and pass those lessons to the extent that you believe this, you see. Now a lot of people in this country, white and black, really dont believe that. They dont believe that the system deliberately did this to us. Because they... personally have never insisted that a black man hate himself, you know. And they personally have never really hanged or lynched a black man recently, you know. But that is not the point. That is not the point Stokely and I want to make in this book. The point we are trying to make in this book is that ones individual stance in relationship to the black man is irrelevant. Its what the system does and thats why we use the term institutional racism.”
Hamilton also takes issue with narratives that black people must integrate into American society. Referencing James Baldwin's “Nobody Knows My Name,” claims that black people are taught to hate themselves, and people who hate themselves cannot truly integrate into a society because they will suppress their true selves. He adds that when white people are making these calls for integration, they are rarely made from a place of goodwill, but out of a desire for black people to suppress their culture and act more like the white elites who oppress them.[6]
Hamilton's pioneering work on Black Power and institutional racism has left an enduring impact on political science and civil rights activism, influencing generations of scholars and activists. His concept of institutional racism reshaped public discourse, providing a framework for understanding systemic discrimination beyond individual acts of prejudice.[6][7] Scholars and civil rights leaders have continued to draw on his work, citing his insights as foundational to the study of systemic racism in America.[5]
Death
On February 18, 2024 it was announced that Hamilton had died in Chicago on November 18, 2023, at the age of 94.[2] His death was confirmed to the New York Times by his nephew Kevin Lacey and friends Wilmot James and Jeh C. Johnson.[2] Lacey stated that the delay in revealing his death was due to the fact that Hamilton, who lived a modest and private life, was "concerned about what would or would not happen upon his passing."[2][7]
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals. They ensure ones entitlement to participate in the civil and political life of society and the state.
Civil rights generally include ensuring peoples physical and mental integrity, life, and safety, protection from discrimination, the right to privacy, the freedom of thought, speech, religion, press, assembly, and movement.
Political rights include natural justice (procedural fairness) in law, such as the rights of the accused, including the right to a fair trial; due process; the right to seek redress or a legal remedy; and rights of participation in civil society and politics such as freedom of association, the right to assemble, the right to petition, the right of self-defense, and the right to vote. These rights also must follow the legal norm as in they must have the force of law and fit into the system of administrative justice. A key feature in modern society is that the more a state can guarantee political rights of citizens the better the states relations are with its citizens.[1]
Civil and political rights form the original and main part of international human rights.[2] They comprise the first portion of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (with economic, social, and cultural rights comprising the second portion). The theory of three generations of human rights considers this group of rights to be "first-generation rights", and the theory of negative and positive rights considers them to be generally negative rights.
History
The phrase "civil rights" is a translation of Latin jus civis (right of the citizen). Roman citizens could be either free (libertas) or servile (servitus), but they all had rights in law.[3] After the Edict of Milan in 313, these rights included the freedom of religion; however, in 380, the Edict of Thessalonica required all subjects of the Roman Empire to profess Nicene Christianity.[4] Roman legal doctrine was lost during the Middle Ages, but claims of universal rights could still be made based on Christian doctrine. According to the leaders of Ketts Rebellion (1549), "all bond men may be made free, for God made all free with his precious blood-shedding."[5]
In the 17th century, English common law judge Sir Edward Coke revived the idea of rights based on citizenship by arguing that Englishmen had historically enjoyed such rights. The Parliament of England adopted the English Bill of Rights in 1689. It was one of the influences drawn on by George Mason and James Madison when drafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776. The Virginia declaration heavily influenced the U.S. Bill of Rights (1789).[6]
The removal by legislation of a civil right constitutes a "civil disability". In early 19th century Britain, the phrase "civil rights" most commonly referred to the issue of such legal discrimination against Catholics. In the House of Commons, support for civil rights was divided, with many politicians agreeing with the existing civil disabilities of Catholics. The Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 restored their civil rights.[7]
In the United States, the term civil rights has been associated with the civil rights movement (1954–1968), which fought against racism.[8] The movement also fought segregation and Jim Crow laws and this fight took place in the streets, in public places, in government, and in the courts including the Supreme Court.[9] The civil rights movement was also not the only movement fighting for civil rights as The Black Panthers were also a group focused on fighting racism and Jim Crow.
Other things that civil rights have been associated with are not just race but also rights of Transgender and other LGBTQ individuals. These have been fights over sexuality instead of race and focused around whether these individuals may access certain spaces like bathrooms according to their sexual identity or biological sex. Gavin Grimms fight in Virginia over whether he could use the bathroom of his choice is a well known case in these civil right fights.[10]
Another issue in civil rights has been the issue with police brutality in certain communities especially minority communities. This has been seen as another way for minority groups to be oppressed and their rights infringed upon. Outrage has also been a massive result of incidents caught on tape of police abusing and in some cases causing the deaths of people from minority groups such as African Americans. That is why to address the issue has been accountability to police engaging in such conduct as a way to deter other officers from committing similar actions.[11]
Protection of rights
T. H. Marshall notes that civil rights were among the first to be recognized and codified, followed later by political rights and still later by social rights. In many countries, they are constitutional rights and are included in a bill of rights or similar document. They are also defined in international human rights instruments, such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Civil and political rights need not be codified to be protected. However, most democracies worldwide do have formal written guarantees of civil and political rights. Civil rights are considered to be natural rights. Thomas Jefferson wrote in his A Summary View of the Rights of British America that "a free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."
The question of to whom civil and political rights apply is a subject of controversy. Although in many countries citizens are considered to have greater protections against infringement of rights than non-citizens, civil and political rights are generally considered to be universal rights that apply to all persons. One thing to mention is that if individuals have fewer political rights than are they more likely to commit political violence such as in countries where individual rights are highly restricted.[12] That is why it is important for countries to protect the political rights of all citizens including minority groups. This extends to racial, ethnic, tribal, and religious groups. By granting them the same rights it helps reduce the risk of political violence breaking out.[13]
According to political scientist Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr., analyzing the causes of and lack of protection from human rights abuses in the Global South should be focusing on the interactions of domestic and international factors—an important perspective that has usually been systematically neglected in the social science literature.[14]
Other rights
Custom also plays a role. Implied or unenumerated rights are rights that courts may find to exist even though not expressly guaranteed by written law or custom; one example is the right to privacy in the United States, and the Ninth Amendment explicitly shows that other rights are also protected.
The United States Declaration of Independence states that people have unalienable rights including "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness". It is considered by some that the sole purpose of government is the protection of life, liberty , and property.[15]
Some thinkers have argued that the concepts of self-ownership and cognitive liberty affirm rights to choose the food one eats,[16][17] the medicine one takes,[18][19][20] and the habit one indulges.[21][22][23]
Social movements for civil rights
Main article: Civil rights movements
Savka Dabčević-Kučar, Croatian Spring participant; Europes first female prime minister
Civil rights guarantee equal protection under the law. When civil and political rights are not guaranteed to all as part of equal protection of laws, or when such guarantees exist on paper but are not respected in practice, opposition, legal action and even social unrest may ensue.
Civil rights movements in the United States gathered steam by 1848 with such documents as the Declaration of Sentiment.[24][full citation needed] Consciously modeled after the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments became the founding document of the American womens movement, and it was adopted at the Seneca Falls Convention, July 19 and 20, 1848.[25][full citation needed]
Worldwide, several political movements for equality before the law occurred between approximately 1950 and 1980. These movements had a legal and constitutional aspect, and resulted in much law-making at both national and international levels. They also had an activist side, particularly in situations where violations of rights were widespread. Movements with the proclaimed aim of securing observance of civil and political rights included:
the civil rights movement in the United States, where rights of black citizens had been violated;
the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, formed in 1967 following failures in this province of the United Kingdom to respect the Roman Catholic minoritys rights; and
movements in many Communist countries, such as the Prague Spring and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and the uprisings in Hungary.
Most civil rights movements relied on the technique of civil resistance, using nonviolent methods to achieve their aims.[26] In some countries, struggles for civil rights were accompanied, or followed, by civil unrest and even armed rebellion. While civil rights movements over the last sixty years have resulted in an extension of civil and political rights, the process was long and tenuous in many countries, and many of these movements did not achieve or fully achieve their objectives.
Problems and analysis
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Questions about civil and political rights have frequently emerged. For example, to what extent should the government intervene to protect individuals from infringement on their rights by other individuals, or from corporations—e.g., in what way should employment discrimination in the private sector be dealt with?
Political theory deals with civil and political rights. Robert Nozick and John Rawls expressed competing visions in Nozicks Anarchy, State, and Utopia and Rawls A Theory of Justice. Other influential authors in the area include Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, and Jean Edward Smith.
First-generation rights
First-generation rights, often called "blue" rights,[citation needed] deal essentially with liberty and participation in political life. They are fundamentally civil and political in nature, as well as strongly individualistic: They serve negatively to protect the individual from excesses of the state. First-generation rights include, among other things, freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, (in some countries) the right to keep and bear arms, freedom of religion, freedom from discrimination, and voting rights. They were pioneered in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century during the Age of Enlightenment. Political theories associated with the English, American, and French revolutions were codified in the English Bill of Rights in 1689 (a restatement of Rights of Englishmen, some dating back to Magna Carta in 1215) and more fully in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 and the United States Bill of Rights in 1791.[27][28]
They were enshrined at the global level and given status in international law first by Articles 3 to 21 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and later in the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In Europe, they were enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights in 1953.
Civil and political rights organizations
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There are current organizations that exist to protect peoples civil and political rights in case they are infringed upon. The ACLU, founded in 1920, is a well-known non-profit organization that helps to preserve freedom of speech and works to change policy.[29] Another organization is the NAACP, founded in 1909, which focuses on protecting the civil rights of minorities. The NRA is a civil rights group founded in 1871 that primarily focuses on protecting the right to bear arms. These organizations serve a variety of causes, one being the AFL–CIO, which is Americas union that represent the working-class people nationwide.[30]
Political scientists often classify themselves as either empiricists or interpretative analysts. The career of Charles V. Hamilton reflects both traditions. His search for meaning within politics is found in his teaching, writing, and speeches. He was a teenager when the publication of Gunner Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem in Modern Democracy (1944) spotlighted the country's racial issues and when President Truman integrated the military (1948), in which Hamilton served for a year. A chronicler of the Civil Rights Movement, he was a young adult at the time of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56). He lived through the Jim Crow era and witnessed the political transformation that made possible the election of black officials in the South. Watching the unfolding of civil rights history informed and enriched his scholarship as he created a role for himself as an intellectual amongst activists.
Stirring Up Tuskegee
I first met Charles Vernon Hamilton when I was a student at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. It was immediately obvious that Hamilton was different from the other professors. Not a Southerner, he did not sound like the rest of the Tuskegee faculty. Students in the dormitories would imitate his charismatic cadences, precise grammar, and impressive diction. He did not behave like most of the faculty, either.
Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1929, Hamilton had attended Roosevelt University, considered a hotbed of Chicago radicalism when he graduated in 1951. In contrast, in the 1950s Tuskegee Institute was still governed by the conservative ideas of the late Booker T. Washington, who had founded the college in 1881, and his approach to politics permeated the campus culture. Washington stressed economic preparation, rather than protest, as the means of promoting the social mobility of black people. But unlike most Tuskegee professors, who always seemed so deferential toward the school's traditions, Hamilton was not afraid to discuss the Civil Rights Movement or other controversial issues in class.
Fresh from participating in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I was hoping that my courses at Tuskegee would teach me how to facilitate the making of a racially integrated America. However, in 1958, the year Hamilton arrived, most students still rarely left the self-contained campus of this black college where they were protected from the highly segregated, potentially life-threatening surrounding community.
As civil disobedience grew in the South, it was not uncommon for worried parents to write to students warning them to stay away from protests and “just get your education.” Thus, when Hamilton joined the faculty, students at Tuskegee had had little involvement in the types of civil rights actions that had begun to flourish in other places. Some time later, when Tuskegee Institute students held their first civil rights demonstration, against segregation in downtown Tuskegee, it was not surprising that people pointed to Hamilton's influence.
Always challenging his students to raise their own questions about commonly accepted ideas, Hamilton encouraged us to debate the issues of the day. But whenever anyone made a comment off the top of his head, Hamilton would shoot back, “Show me your data.” Unsupported statements were not acceptable for political scientists, he would tell us.Hamilton quickly gained a reputation for teaching American government courses with a sense of urgency and skepticism. His lectures often contradicted the glowing textbook references to American democracy and the nation's venerated political institutions. He would point out, for instance, that while espousing the ideals of freedom and democracy, most of the country's founders were slave owners. He would note that the Supreme Court had ruled on Brown v. Board of Education four years earlier, yet Southern schools were still not desegregated. He would remind students of the signs all around them that read, “White Only” and “Colored Only,” signs that would not come down until 1964. When Martin Luther King Jr. visited Tuskegee in the late 1950s, school administrators, fearful of reprisals from the white community, would not permit him to appear on campus, so he spoke at a local church instead. Sitting in the audience, I realized that Hamilton was the only Tuskegee professor in attendance. At a time when many people (both black and white) saw King as an outsider whose methods of nonviolent protest would only stir up more trouble for black people, Hamilton stood on stage with King and even had his photograph taken with him.
One hot topic was the efficacy of Martin Luther King's nonviolent confrontational approach versus the legalistic tactics of Roy Wilkins and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Hamilton had received his law degree from Loyola University in 1954, but he had always wanted to be a college professor and play an active role in the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Thus, he was drawn to Tuskegee since his wife, Dona Cooper Hamilton '82SW, was the daughter of a professor of veterinary medicine there. Hamilton's legal training allowed him to appreciate Roy Wilkins' view that to bring about real change, you had to have the law on your side. Hamilton realized, though, that this was a slow process, and he believed that King's protests were a necessary element as well.
With the Civil Rights Movement a perfect backdrop for his lectures, Hamilton helped us understand the importance of both approaches in overcoming Jim Crow. However, as he became a model for young people aching to be on the front lines of the struggle, his colleagues and school administrators grew increasingly uncomfortable.
In 1960, when Tuskegee refused to renew his contract, Hamilton walked into a lecture with the termination letter in his shirt pocket. Students saw this as an act of defiance. Although he later told me that he had not been as confident as he acted, his unapologetic expression of his ideas, both inside and outside the classroom, left a lasting impression on me and his other students.
Hamilton's brief years at Tuskegee had given him the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the civil rights challenges faced by black Americans in the rural South. He went on to receive his PhD in political science at the University of Chicago and to teach at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, New Jersey (1963–64), Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (1964–67), and Roosevelt University in Chicago (1967–69). His students had the privilege of listening to him as he outlined his preliminary thinking about the future of American democracy, ideas that would find their way onto many a printed page.
After Black Power: The Columbia Years
In 1969, Hamilton arrived at Columbia University as a Ford Foundation–funded professor in urban political science and became one of the first African Americans to hold an academic chair at an Ivy League university. It was the height of the turbulent 1960s, and the nation was reeling from assassinations, demonstrations, and riots. These currents were felt with particular force at Columbia.
Hamilton was at the peak of his fame as the intellectual half of the “Black Power Duo.” The activist half was Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), a former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, self-professed Black Nationalist, and nascent Pan-Africanist. In a brilliant stroke, Hamilton had teamed up with Carmichael, a folk hero and icon for his generation, to write what would be Hamilton's most famous book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967).
Hamilton's Black Power co-author, Stokely Carmichael (a.k.a. Kwame Ture) (l), and fellow activist H. Rap Brown (r) talked to reporters outside Hamilton Hall, one of five Columbia University buildings occupied by students in April 1968.
Hamilton's Black Power co-author, Stokely Carmichael (a.k.a. Kwame Ture) (l), and fellow activist H. Rap Brown (r) talked to reporters outside Hamilton Hall, one of five Columbia University buildings occupied by students in April 1968.
Black Power became the manifesto of the black solidarity movement. The popularity of this book had transformed Hamilton into a highly visible public intellectual. Across the country, white Americans wanted to know what black people thought, what they wanted, and how they planned to get it. The book signaled a shift in thinking among black intellectuals: They knew that the triumphal days of the Civil Rights Movement were coming to an end and that they needed to consider the next step. With its theme of self-determination, Black Power allowed the intellectual community to focus more clearly on the future of black people in America. The book became a bestseller and was translated into several languages.
During the 1970s, as New York City experienced a fiscal crisis and underwent a demographic transformation that saw increases in its minority population, City politicians looked to Hamilton for advice. In the 1977 New York mayoral election, candidates competed for his endorsement even though he lived in New Rochelle.
Named the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia in 1971, Hamilton taught American government, urban politics, and minority politics. A very popular teacher, he drew large numbers of students to his courses. In 1973 Hamilton recruited me as a junior faculty member. During the seven years I spent at Columbia, I taught undergraduate courses in political science and Contemporary Civilization. More important, I had a second opportunity to learn from Hamilton, whom I had not seen since our Tuskegee days 13 years earlier.
Not only did I come to call him “Chuck,” but I also got a chance to watch him teach both undergraduate and graduate students. He once told me that when he first started at Columbia, every course he taught had the word black in the title. However, since his expertise was far broader than protest politics, he soon began to teach graduate courses on public policy and undergraduate courses on American government. Despite his busy schedule, Hamilton was always approachable. The hallway outside his office at the southwest end of the SIPA building was often filled with students discussing City administration, presidential politics, and changes in the black leadership class.
He and I had many lively political discussions as well. I remember his explaining his theory of the connection between welfare and “functional anonymity”—that one unintended consequence of the welfare system was that it made black people less willing to confront social and political inequities for fear that speaking up would cost them their invisibility, and thus put an end to their benefits.
Columbia University's political science department was divided into four sections: theory, comparative politics, international relations, and American politics. For years Hamilton led the American section, consisting of a fascinating team of scholars that included Demetrios (Jim) Caraley '54CC '62GSAS, Alan Westin, Robert Shapiro, and Ira Katznelson '66CC. When Hamilton and Caraley were interested in starting a master's program in public administration, they enlisted me to draft the initial proposal for the program. It was adopted and established in the School of International Affairs (now the School of International and Public Affairs).
During my time at Columbia, Hamilton assumed leadership of the Metropolitan Applied Research Center (MARC) from the retiring director, Kenneth Clark '40GSAS '70HON. Hamilton also served three years (1983–86) as a consultant to the Ford Foundation. Among the many honors and awards he has received, Columbia University presented him with the Mark Van Doren Award for Excellence in undergraduate teaching in 1982 and the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates in 1986. In 1993 he was elected a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. When the Chicago Sun-Times listed the leading scholars in America in 1995, Hamilton was one of four Columbia professors included.
Controversial Encounters
One of Hamilton's best-received books, Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (1991), demonstrated his skills as a political analyst and historian. The first African American to represent New York in the U.S. Congress (in 1945), Powell was known for his flamboyant antics, which were legendary in Harlem and in the halls of Congress. Hamilton went behind the legend to discover a man with incredible rhetorical talent and legislative skills, yet one who squandered opportunities to accomplish more.
For instance, Hamilton noted that as chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, Powell would attach the so-called “Powell Amendment” to any bill that came before him. Stating that unless states desegregated they would be denied federal funds, this amendment was a symbolic gesture that demonstrated his power to affect public policy.
Like Powell, Hamilton has never been a man to shy away from controversy. He speaks his mind to the powerful and the powerless. He spoke his mind at Tuskegee Institute and at every other institution where he taught. In 1970 Hamilton was among a group of scholars invited to the White House. Apparently President Richard Nixon had read Hamilton's work and wanted to hear more about solutions to the race problem. In what was supposed to be an off-the-record discussion, as Hamilton later recalled, he urged Nixon “to back off the Black Panthers, to stop shooting them.”
A few months later, in a speech in St. Louis, Nixon said that he had met with Charles Hamilton, from “the University of Columbia,” and that Hamilton had assured him that black people in the United States were better off than those anywhere else in the world, American racial problems notwithstanding. “Those words had never crossed my lips,” Hamilton said. He got his chance to respond to Nixon when a group of scholars published a set of essays in a book entitled What Nixon Is Doing to Us (Harper & Row, 1973).
Another example of his outspokenness came in a speech at a 1976 Democratic National Committee meeting, in which Hamilton suggested that it would be acceptable for presidential candidates to soft-pedal the race issue as long as they dealt firmly and unequivocally with issues that affected the black community once they were elected. No matter how sympathetic candidates were to black causes, Hamilton argued, they could do nothing to help African Americans if they alienated their mostly conservative electoral base and never took office. This statement, reflecting Hamilton's pragmatism about electoral politics, was not well received by some black activists. However, Hamilton saw his role as explaining the difference between electoral and protest politics.
This speech also provided a preview of his thinking regarding the possibility of “deracialized politics.” Just as he had done in Black Power, Hamilton anticipated the shift in white attitudes toward race, this time concerning the increasing significance of black elected officials. He advised black politicians to deracialize their campaign rhetoric if they wanted to compete in predominately white cities. He reasoned that since there were a limited number of predominately black cities and congressional districts, a change in tactics was indicated if black politicians wanted to be competitive in mixed districts and statewide elections.
At the time, recommending downplaying the race issue in any way and for any purpose was considered heretical. The deracialization thesis was debated vigorously at the 1976 and 1977 annual meetings of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. However, the idea was vintage Hamiltonian thinking, typically pragmatic. His essay on the topic appeared in The First World, a small journal, under the title “Deracialization: Examination of a Political Strategy.” This essay caused quite a controversy among black political scientists and was one of the central issues in an anthology entitled Race, Politics, and Governance in the United States (1996).
Perhaps Hamilton's most controversial decision was to attend a conference with aides of the Republican President-elect Ronald Reagan. Hamilton, Percy Sutton, former borough president of Manhattan, and Harvard political science professor Martin Kilson were invited as the only black Democrats at the 1980 meeting sponsored by the Institute for Contemporary Studies. This meeting caused a stir in the black intellectual community as some colleagues considered meeting with Republicans an act of party disloyalty. Hamilton saw it as an opportunity to engage in dialogue with emerging black conservatives who would eventually play a more visible role in American politics.
Hamilton was one of the first black social scientists to visit South Africa during the apartheid era, in 1979. His travels to the garrison state left an indelible impression on him. He became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and continued to pursue his interest in the political and economic development of the African continent.
In 1997 Charles V. Hamilton retired from Columbia, and, still actively writing, he now divides his time between South Africa and New York. Through his teaching, books, and speeches, Hamilton has provided a platform from which to debate the great issues of the post–civil rights era. Whether broadening the discussion or challenging his colleagues regarding the direction of the struggle for equality, Hamilton has generated some of the most thoughtful scholarship on race in the twentieth century
The Roosevelt University community mourns the passing and celebrates the life of civil rights leader, political scientist and alumni Charles V. Hamilton. He died on November 18, 2023 in Chicago at the age of 94.
Born in Oklahoma and raised on Chicago's southside, Charles V. Hamilton's career began after he graduated from Roosevelt with a degree in political science in 1951. He later earned a master's degree from the University of Chicago before becoming a faculty member at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute in 1958. There, Dr. Hamilton would develop a reputation as an unwavering supporter of the Civil Rights Movement and would encourage his students to engage with the controversial topic. One former student noted that Dr. Hamilton would encourage debate amongst his students, but with the caveat that they backup their claims with data. “Unsupported statements were not acceptable for political scientists,” was one of Hamilton's common refrains.
After a short time, Dr. Hamilton left Tuskegee to pursue his PhD at the University of Chicago before holding faculty positions at Rutgers University, Lincoln University, Columbia University and, of course, Roosevelt University. He was a professor of political science at Roosevelt from 1967 until 1968. For Dr. Hamilton, a career in academia was more than being a professor, but a viable opportunity to involve students in activism. Outside of the classroom, Dr. Hamilton worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee with civil rights figures like Kwame Ture. He truly was an example of the Roosevelt mission of education intersecting with social justice.
In 1967, Dr. Hamilton alongside Kwame Ture co-published the seminal text Black Power: the Politics of Liberation in America (1967). This revolutionary book traces the history of systemic racism in the United States, defines the meaning of “Black Power” and illustrates meaningful strategies for radical political reformation. Named the “Black Power Duo,” Hamilton and Ture would help guide the latter strategies of the civil rights movement and change how Black leadership and citizens would engage with politics in America and beyond. Dr. Hamilton is also credited as one of the originators of the term “institutional racism,” a phrase that addresses the disconnection between the reality and perception of racism in America drawn across color lines.
Hamilton would spend the rest of his career continuing to work as a political scientist and “academic activist.” He would go on to publish multiple books on different American political figures and continue to teach until his retirement in 1997. A lifelong Laker, Dr. Hamilton joined the Roosevelt University Board of Trustees in 2006. His commitment to the Roosevelt community was unwavering. In 2022, Dr. Hamilton and his wife Dana Cooper Hamilton established the Carol Hamilton Memorial Endowed Scholarship for Roosevelt students. The scholarship honors Hamilton's daughter, Carol, who was press secretary to Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown. Carol was tragically killed in a 1996 crash of an Air Force plane in Croatia. Today, this scholarship honors Carol's legacy by awarding one undergraduate student from the College of Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences.
On November 18, 2023, Charles V. Hamilton died in Chicago at the age of 94. University President Dr. Malekzadeh had this to say about the tragic loss:
“Dr. Hamilton was an exemplary individual, and Roosevelt is beyond proud to have called him one of our own: an alum, a faculty member, a trustee, and a friend. I often reflect upon the time I spent with him on April 26, 2023. In fact, it remains a highlight of my presidency—hosting Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Christopher Reed and his niece, Celeste James, on campus. Rarely do leaders have the privilege of meeting one of their university's earliest alumni, particularly one as remarkable as Dr. Hamilton.”
His legacy remains one of yielding history and political analysis as a weapon to fight systemic oppression. The entire Roosevelt community mourns the loss of our esteemed alum and colleague as we reflect upon his incredible contributions to the betterment of our students and society.
