ABSTRACT
During the height of the most recent peak in the struggle for Black liberation in the United States, the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the clarion call to organize was one of the most profound and most promising developments. The call to organize was profound because it rendered superfluous the simplistic debate about integrationism versus separatism as a strategy for Black progress by affirming that selfdirected and self-defining organizations of those with common purposes and objectives are absolutely necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for progress. The National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) was one of the organizations that grew out of this awareness of the need to organize and the virtue of organizing. Events that took place at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in New York City in September 1969 set the stage for "tactical withdrawal" and the birth of NCOBPS.
