ABSTRACT
I initially attempted to read The Politics of the Black “Nation” while I was a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, a little more than two decades ago. My formal fields of study were American Government (with a concentration in urban politics) and Comparative Politics (with a concentration in the politics of development). Holden’s work came in my informal, unofficial third field of Black Politics, which I had to teach myself, for there were no specialists in this area at Pittsburgh. Perhaps the most provocative sentence in this book is the one that opens the second essay: “White supremacy is the single most important fact in the environment of black politics. How to cope with White supremacy is the single most important issue overtly debated within Black politics” (Holden 1973: 42).
