Considerably less threatening to whites than the average well-armed guerilla warrior, black culture nevertheless promoted resistance and survival during slavery, offered spiritual sustenance throughout the Segregation era, and provided a foundation and reference point for the early civil rights movement. Through various forms of cultural expression, the sociologically and economically disenfranchised of the Black Power years learned that they could define themselves without playing obeisance to whitey. Whether represented by subversive slave folk tales or celebratory soul serenades, Afro-American culture was the central, irreducible, irreplaceable element in the ongoing struggle for psychological liberation and empowerment. (p. 304)

Van Deburg begins the book with the death of Malcolm X and ends it with the death of Elijah Muhammad. It is the struggle within the Black Power movement to appropriate and redefine Malcolm X as symbol that he finds a compelling organizational principle for the movement. Van Deburg's is a study of the culture of a movement that was essentially cultural and more directed at Black self-esteem than at terrorizing whites. Press coverage hardly ever got it right though. And social scientist too have missed the essentially cultural message of the movement.

Studies that showed minimal support for the militants obscured the fact that when the various surveys are sifted more thoroughly, Black Power almost always is revealed to be more popular in its cultural aspects than it was as a political enthusiasm. Support for the movement promoting the study of African languages and culture, for example, tended to run between 40 and 60 percent of those polled. Black Studies programs that would include such courses were even more popular ... Distinctive hair styles, clothing, cuisine, and music won endorsement won endorsement from a wide range of age groups within Black America ... (p. 17)

Getting inside the movement, Van Deburg (like Terry Anderson in his study) goes deep into the sources of the Movement culture. He studies the material produced by the movement, to include speeches, poems, essays, position papers, organizational materials. What emerges is a program for black cultural power. Van Deburg moves form the militants and their programs to ideologies of black power into a consideration of culture as folk expression. He concludes with a discussion of culture as literary and performing arts. The more extreme utterances, calls to violence, were a means of self-defense. Stokely Carmichael was putting the nation on notice that blacks were not going to take the beating and more. They would hit back. From that basic point of self-protection would emerge the cultural respect that "non-violence" could never deliver.

This approach has the benefit of presenting a much richer portrait of the movement than was previously available, but allowing them to speak for themselves also has a downside. Jeffrey T. Sammons, reviewing the book for the Journal of Southern History, points out that Van Deburg's book is excessively critical of those outside the movement and inadequately critical of those inside the movement. Robert Zangrando is slightly more generous in his AHR review, characterizing it as a work that "has the voice of its advocates and practitioners rather than its detractors." Harry Belafonte is left as the "Black Caucasian" the movement condemned him without any analysis of the longer historical perspective, whereas Eldridge Cleaver (who later became a fundamentalist Christian) is severed from his future history. Frozen as a moment in time, the period of 1965-75 is not historicized the way that Sammons would like it to be (it would seem that the conclusion of the paperback rectified this problem) Sammons finds Van Deburg's use of social theory derivative and heavy handed, bringing him to loose a great deal of the complexity of the movement in the interest of fitting individuals into developmental theories which their lives really don't fit into. But this does seem a bit petty, since we do see the impact of the Black Power Movement all around us.