The 1970s are sometimes treated as a quieter period between the dramatic 1960s and the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. In reality, this decade was crucial for translating the moral and legal victories of the civil rights era into structural and political change and for redefining how Black people saw themselves in relation to the nation and the world.
One of the most visible shifts was the rise of Black political power in cities. Throughout the 1970s, more Black mayors and local officials were elected in urban centers with significant Black populations. In 1970, Kenneth Gibson became the first Black mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and by 1973, Maynard Jackson in Atlanta and Coleman Young in Detroit were leading major cities in the South and Midwest. Cities like New Orleans and, later, Chicago followed with Black leadership that had been unthinkable a generation earlier. These victories reflected the cumulative impact of voting rights legislation, community organizing, and demographic changes that shifted political power toward Black urban communities.
Having Black elected officials did not magically solve deep problems like poverty, underfunded schools, or police brutality. City leaders were constrained by state legislatures, federal policies, and shrinking municipal budgets in the wake of deindustrialization and suburban flight. But their presence changed the conversation about who could govern and whose interests deserved a seat at the table. It also created new debates within Black communities about accountability, strategy, and what true representation should look like when Black faces in high places had to govern within hostile political and economic structures.
On the national stage, Shirley Chisholm embodied this new political boldness. Elected in 1968 as the first Black woman in Congress, she launched a historic campaign for president in 1972 and described herself as “unbought and unbossed.” Chisholm’s run challenged both racism and sexism in national politics, insisting that American democracy could not be complete while women and people of color were systematically excluded from power. Though she did not win the nomination, she helped expand the country’s political imagination and paved the way for future candidates of color and women at every level of government.
Education and culture also evolved significantly. The ideas that had driven Negro History Week and early efforts to teach Black history grew into more formal Black Studies and African American Studies programs on college campuses. By the early 1970s, hundreds of Black Studies programs, departments, and institutes had been founded, reflecting sustained student pressure to create curricula that centered Black experiences, histories, and philosophies. This institutionalization of Black scholarship meant that the work of remembering and analyzing Black life gained a firmer foothold in academia, even as programs had to fight for funding, faculty positions, and legitimacy within universities.
Legally, the 1970s grappled with how to address the legacy of segregation in the North as well as the South. In Boston, that struggle had been building for years before it erupted into the busing crisis. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling declared school segregation unconstitutional, Boston’s schools remained deeply unequal. In 1960, Ruth Batson, a Roxbury mother and leader in the local NAACP, began publicly challenging the conditions in predominantly Black schools and asking why her children received less than their White peers. She and other activists, including organizer Mel King, documented overcrowded classrooms, crumbling buildings, and far lower funding in Black neighborhoods, but the Boston School Committee, chaired by Louise Day Hicks, rejected calls to even acknowledge that segregation existed.
By the early 1970s, Black parents and civil rights lawyers had turned to the courts as a last resort. In 1974, a federal judge concluded that the School Committee had deliberately maintained a segregated system and ordered a desegregation plan that included busing. The fierce resistance that followed, from protests to violent attacks on Black students, revealed that racial inequality in education was not just a Southern problem tied to explicit Jim Crow laws. It was also a Northern problem rooted in housing patterns, local politics, and long‑standing refusals, like those confronted by Batson and King, to treat Black children’s education as equally worthy of care and investment.
In 1978, the Supreme Court’s decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke addressed the question of affirmative action in higher education. The Court struck down a rigid quota system at the University of California, Davis medical school, but held that race could be considered as one factor among many in admissions decisions. This compromise shaped access to elite institutions for decades and sparked ongoing debates about what fairness and equality really require, given that past and present discrimination has structured who gets to compete in the first place.
Within this context, 1976 stands out as a key milestone for our 2026 theme. That year, the United States officially recognized Black History Month, expanding the week Carter G. Woodson had launched in 1926. President Gerald Ford urged Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history,” linking the new national observance to the nation’s Bicentennial reflections on whose stories counted as American history. The move did not solve the deeper problem of how history was taught, but it signaled that Black history had a claim on the national calendar and on public memory.
Culturally, the 1970s saw the continued flourishing of Black music, fashion, and identity. The Black Arts Movement, which had begun in the late 1960s, carried forward into the decade as poets, visual artists, and theater groups created work that was explicitly political and rooted in Black pride. Soul and funk dominated Black radio, while the earliest stirrings of hip hop in places like the Bronx offered new soundtracks for communities navigating both newfound opportunities and persistent inequalities. Afros, dashikis, and other styles visibly proclaimed a commitment to Black beauty and self-definition in everyday life as well as on stage and screen.
In terms of identity, the language shifted. Terms like “Negro,” dominant in earlier decades, gave way to “Black,” and later “African American,” reflecting evolving understandings of heritage, diaspora, and solidarity. Increasing awareness of African independence movements and global struggles against colonialism encouraged Black Americans to see themselves as part of a larger African and African descended world rather than solely as a minority inside the United States’ borders. These shifts in naming were not mere semantics; they were part of a broader effort to claim dignity, history, and connection on one’s own terms.
When we frame the 1970s within A Century of Black History, we see them as a decade of institution-building and definition-making. The big marches had not stopped, but more energy was directed into shaping schools, city governments, college curricula, and legal doctrines that would outlast any single protest. The question was no longer only, “Will we be allowed in?” but also, “What will we build once we are here?”
For us in 2026, the 1970s offer tools for thinking about long-term change. Movements cannot live on adrenaline alone; they need institutions, policies, and sustained intellectual work to hold gains through backlash and shifting political winds. The creation of Black Studies programs, the fights over affirmative action, and the election of Black mayors these might seem less dramatic than a march across a bridge, but they are just as central to the story of Black freedom and to how power is negotiated over generations.
The decade also warns us that representation without resources, or inclusion without real voice, is incomplete. The presence of Black officials and professionals in prominent roles must be matched by policies that address material conditions in schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and prisons. As we mark 100 years since Woodson’s first Negro History Week, the 1970s push us to ask not only how history is remembered, but how its lessons are implemented in the systems that shape our lives.
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