"As Long as You're South of the Canadian Border—You're South!": The Rise of Black Power in North Omaha, Nebraska

The objective of this master’s thesis is to configure a socio-historic narrative in such a way that it clearly illustrates how and why much of North Omaha’s Black American collective transitioned from a mundane migratory movement to that of the Black Panther Party. To wholly comprehend the essence and relevance of Black Power one must understand its lesser-known evolution in locales such as Omaha, Nebraska, in the Midwest. Hopefully, this research will enhance a pre-existing trove that other historians may pull from to consider similarities and juxtapositions of causal dynamics that underpinned Black Power in different regions of the United States. Regarding the arguments put forward, there are two. The foremost contention is that the physical manifestation of Black Power in North Omaha (the Black Panther Party and related persons or matters) did not occur in a vacuum; instead, it was a response to decades of violent dehumanization and a revolutionary function of necessity spawned for the physical defense and socio-political uplift of its people. Secondarily, many agree with what one of North Omaha’s native sons, Malcolm X postulated during his politically charged 1964 The Ballot or the Bullet speech when he forcefully verbalized his thought that for Black folks, there was no difference between the North and the South concerning how they were treated. The intention here is to provide evidence that, although many Black people took flight toward various areas of the United States, including the Midwest, for a primary reason of escaping the criminally savage Jim Crow Deep South, they inevitably experienced what Malcolm meant by what he said. The methodology is straight-forward in that courte durées (flashpoint events) within conjunctures, including their most impactful and impacted actors (people, places, and institutions), are utilized to develop a literary bridge connecting the Red Summer of 1919 to the Black Panther Party of the mid to late 1960s. This bridge will incorporate narrative planks based on the following: the Great Black Migration, the Great Depression, and the World War II and Civil Rights-Vietnam War Eras.

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