Finally we have a book that clearly shows Black Power was a social movement and, more importantly, that it left an institutional and political imprint on black professional organizations. After The Black Power Movement and American Social Work, no serious scholar can treat the Black Power movement as the crazy uncle of the civil rights movement. We are all indebted to Bell for this important scholarly tome. -- Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University Joyce M. Bell has written an important book. The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s is often viewed as a disastrous social movement that fractured the constructive change achieved by Martin Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent Southern civil rights movement. Bell's book shatters this myth by revealing the pivotal role Black Power politics played in reshaping the social work profession. She shows how both white and black social workers were forced to reexamine their fundamental assumptions regarding how they should attend to the needs of their clients, especially poor people of color. The story of how the Black Power movement changed social work is not widely known or understood. The Black Power Movement and American Social Work erases this ignorance, enabling both professional social workers and the larger public to reach a sophisticated understanding of an important moment in our history. -- Aldon Morris, Northwestern University

The Black Power movement has often been portrayed in history and popular culture as the quintessential "bad boy" of modern black movement-making in America. Yet this impression misses the full extent of Black Power's contributions to U.S. society, especially in regard to black professionals in social work. Relying on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, Joyce M. Bell follows two groups of black social workers in the 1960s and 1970s as they mobilized Black Power ideas, strategies, and tactics to change their national professional associations. Comparing black dissenters within the National Federation of Settlements (NFS), who fought for concessions from within their organization, and those within the National Conference on Social Welfare (NCSW), who ultimately adopted a separatist strategy, she shows how the Black Power influence was central to the creation and rise of black professional associations. She also provides a nuanced approach to studying race-based movements and offers a framework for understanding the role of social movements in shaping the non-state organizations of civil society.