The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

In charting a path forward for Black Americans, Blow first reflects on what he considers the last great mobilization of Black people: the Great Migration. However, both Blow and Timuel Black retrospectively consider it a naïve affair and an abject failure as a tactic for escaping white supremacy and fostering Black power.

In searching for prosperity and escape from oppressive white supremacy, Black people fell under the allure that things were different in North. For some migrants and their descendants, the Great Migration proved to be socially and economically fulfilling. A 2017 University of Michigan study that found Black migrant children “graduated from high school at a rate of 11 percent higher than their [southern] counterparts, made about $1000 dollars more per year […] and were 11 percent less likely to be in poverty” (25).

Success stories were an essential component to solidifying the northern prosperity myth. To advocate migration, Black leaders and advocacy groups distributed pamphlets lauding the myth and teaching Black southerners how to assimilate (17). Such was the frenzy that even “relatives or friends […] sent letters” that encouraged migration (17). Timuel’s mother succumbed to the same impulses when encouraging him with Black role models who succeeded in segregated Chicago (20).

Blow refutes these rosy characterizations, arguing that despite plenty of success stories, Black achievement and success on par with white society was unallowable. Instead, Black migrants found the same racism they sought to escape in the South. Considering this, Blow finds the values of white northerners particularly rich given their supposed moral superiority for fighting to end slavery in the Civil War and provide civil rights in the Reconstruction Era. When forced to live by their own values and adopt Black migrants into their cities and communities, white northerners fell into the same racism prevalent in the South. White northerners “employed many of the same brutal tactics—oppressive policing, housing discrimination, restrictive employment—that southern racists had used to keep Black folks subordinate and separate” (20).

Compounding the struggle for Black power in destination cities was the insurgent Black elitism that formed during the restrictive covenants era. Timuel explains: “‘We, who had the skills and the experience’ to help provide the economic security that Black people needed ‘did not share that with our less fortunate brother and sister’ as had been done for them” (21). Blow believes the Black elite steeped themselves in white supremacy, most notably by how they advised Black migrants to act white and to avoid attention (17). To Blow, the Black elite are as much a contributing element to the Great Migration’s failure as they are a symptom of its failure to produce an equal society.

Chapter 1 also develops the theme of an immoral equivalency between the North and South. Blow equates the two as regions caught in different parts of the same cycle, where “in the South, it’s an old man. There, racism hasn’t vanished (far from it), but it has come to terms with itself. In the North, particularly in destination cities, racism is a teenage boy, acting out as the old man did years ago” (27). That there is no haven for Black people is a damning accusation, and it is central to Blow’s proposal for realizing Black power.

While the Great Migration failed, its pathos for creating a Black community is what should drive Black people to attempt radical change. As it stands, Blow believes that Black power is unachievable because Black populations are too dispersed due to the Great Migration. While the popular trend toward activism aims to achieve Black power, Blow finds protest increasingly demonstrative and less substantive (26-27). Instead, he believes that by centralizing Black population density as it was before the Great Migration, Black people will possess the power necessary to achieve their goals.