Charles v hamilton biography

From Muskogee to Morningside Heights: Political Scientist Charles V. Hamilton

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 H

Institutional racism and functional anonymity are two concepts from the political corpus of Dr. Charles V. Hamilton, but it was his advocacy of Black Power that gave him long standing academic prominence and respect. A scholar who was more interested in conveying his ideas in the classroom, leaving the bullhorn to Stokely Carmichael, Hamilton’s reticence almost made his death in November in Chicago go unnoticed. He was 94, and no causes of his death were reported.

Dr. Hamilton might have quietly continued to teach without public attention, but the book he co-authored with Carmichael (who later changed his name to Kwame Ture), “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America,” thrust him momentarily on the ramparts, though it was Ture’s promotion that gave the concept its popularity in radical circles. While Ture shouted “Black Power,” Hamilton was content to stay in the stacks, conducting research that led to his biography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. in 1991 and other political issues and debates.

Hamilton was born in Muskogee, Okla., on October 19, 19

Charles V. Hamilton, 1929-2023: The Philosopher Behind ‘Black Power’

Political scientist Charles V. Hamilton, the tokenizer of the term ‘institutional racism,’ an apostle of the Black Power movement, and at times deemed both too radical and too deferential in how to fight for racial equity, died on November 18, 2023. He was 94.

Wilmot James, a friend and colleague of Hamilton, described Hamilton as a modest and private man, — James even he learned of his passing from Hamilton’s bank representative, The New York Times reported. Jeh C. Johnson, former secretary of homeland security and friend of Hamilton, remembers him in a similar way. “He was not a screamer, he was not a rebel. He was a quiet, dignified, soft-spoken, very progressive intellect behind the Black Power movement,” Johnson said in an interview.

Yet for such a composed individual, Hamilton is best known for Black Power: The Politics of Liberation – a manifesto written alongside Stokely Carmichael that shook up the multiracial anti-discrimination crusade in the 1960s. Their manifesto concluded th

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