ABSTRACT
I have repeatedly stated [to anyone who will listen] that The Black “Nation” is the single best treatment of black politics by an academic political scientist extant. Indeed, in my view, it ranks with Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and Kwame Türe (aka: Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power as seminal works of those of us scholars of the Civil Rights generation. I have consistently turned to The Black “Nation” in my research and writing, from my first professional paper delivered at an annual meeting of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS), which was a partial text of Holden’s “Black quasi-government” thesis (Smith, 1978).
