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Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and Before That Negroes)
by Nelson George

One of the foremost chroniclers of the contemporary black experience offers an undeluded perspective on the 1980s. Here are crack, AIDS, and the Reagan rollback of the major advances of the civil rights movement. But Nelson George also shows how black performers, athletes, and activists made increasing inroads into the mainstream. This fast-paced, chronological retrospective profiles personalities from Bill Cosby to Louis Farrakhan and explores such flashpoints as the first rap single and the infamous Willie Horton ad campaign.

For centuries the word "soul" was (pardon the pun) solely employed by religious leaders and philosophers to describe man's spiritual core. The soul could be cursed to eternal damnation. The soul could rise up to heavenly salvation. God and the Devil have sparred over the soul of man since before the very devout Bible was written. The soul has always been that region of consciousness that truly defined us, not the temple of flesh we walk around in. To this day the soul is, in popular consciousness, associated with one's spiritual dimensions, as the ubiquitous best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul books testified to at the turn of the century.

It was no coincidence then that those black singers of the '60s began describing the popular music as "soul music," since its musical base (rhythm, melody, vocal arrangement) all harked back to the sounds heard in the Christian churches that nurtured them. Though the subject matter of soul music was secular usually love, lust, and loss soul was descended from gospel, and when performed by a queen like Aretha Franklin, the music possessed the devotional intensity of a Sunday sermon.

From this simple linguistic transfer came a wider use of the word. As the sixties progressed, soul signaled not simply a style of pop music but the entire heritage and culture of blacks (or Negroes or colored or Afro-Americans, depending on the year and context). We became "soul sistas" and "soul brothers" who dined on "soul food," exchanged "soul shakes," celebrated with "soul claps" as "soul children" marching for "soul power" while listening to "soul brother number one," James Brown. This social use of soul quickly became commodified, resulting in soul magazines, soul barbershops, soul hair-care products, and an enduring TV show called Soul Train. Motown records founder Berry Gordy, never a man to miss a trick, even copyrighted the word and released records on the Soul label.

References to the '60s soul still pop up in music videos, commercials, and movies with great regularity. But they usually just skim the commercial surface of an era that for the black community had depth, substance, and edge. The sixties weren't about fried chicken those ten years were the apex of the struggle of blacks for full citizenship a battle that began the day President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but that took on a new urgency after World War II. That's when Americans of many hues (and too many foreign observers for the government's comfort) began pointing out the hypocrisy of a nation that battled Nazi hate but practiced institutionalized racism.

With a biblical ferver born of a desire to bring this country's everyday reality in line with our Constitution's soaring rhetoric, the civil rights movement remade America. Through legislation and marching, moral suasion and bloodshed, from 1946 into the 1970s, official barriers were smashed with the legislative and moral apex of the sixties.

I was a child during the '60s and I remember that "We Shall Overcome" energy with great affection. For me this historic period was absolutely about soul in its deepest spiritual meaning. It was about faith in the human capacity for change and a palpable optimism about the future. It's not necessary to recite the huge list of accomplishments of that epoch to say that period was witness to dramatic concrete action and a sense of commitment that defined the life of Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, and thousands of others. And that hard, visionary work was all about soul.

The term "post-soul" defines the twisting, troubling, turmoil-filled, and often terrific years since the mid-seventies when black America moved into a new phase of its history. Post-soul is my shorthand to describe a time when America attempted to absorb the victories, failures, and ambiguities that resulted from the soul years. The post-soul years have witnessed an unprecedented acceptance of black people in the public life of America. As political figures, advertising images, pop stars, coworkers, and classmates, the descendants of African slaves have made their presence felt and, to a remarkable degree considering this country's brutal history, been accepted as citizens, if not always as equals.

Unfortunately, all that progress has not been as beneficial to the black masses as was anticipated in the '60s. The achievements of role models have not necessarily had a tangible impact on the realities of persistent poverty, poor education, and lingering, deep-seated social discrimination. A determined conservative backlash against the government's role in altering social conditions, heretofore repressed class tensions within the black community, widespread drug use, and a debilitating cynicism that runs counter to the spirit of the soul years are just some of the elements that make the post-soul years often seem a muddle.

Documenting the post-soul era is not about chronicling the straight line of a social movement, but collecting disparate fragments that form not a linear story, but a collage. Several trends some direct reactions to the soul years, others revolutions that could not have been anticipated drive this tangled narrative. An unprecedented number of black officials were elected in this period, men and women who were then challenged both to improve the race's well-being and to serve the needs of their other (presumably white) constituents. The post-soul period witnessed the ascendance, via high-visibility government appointments and jobs in media, of black conservatives who challenged the traditional views of black politics and values. The era fostered the creativity, desperation, and rage of the poor, communicated to the larger world through inspired artistry and destructive behavior, both on a scale never seen before; revealed the potency of black female writers and public intellectuals in the discourse of race and sex, and the often bitter backlash against these women from black men of many classes; and revived older notions of black nationalism and street protest as well as a critique of integration that encourages interest in African culture and non-Christian religions.

By decade's end "black" itself, as the verbal identification of race, would be, if not replaced, at least challenged or reinterpreted by the introduction of a new phrase. In fact the definition of blackness would be in play in the '80s, with terms like "buppie," "b-boy," "BAP," "underclass," "womanist," and "Afrocentricity" entering the lexicon. Some of these terms were sepia-tinted versions of white reality; others slang terms and academic inventions that captured new identities.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Nelson George is an award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction. He has written for Playboy, Billboard, Esquire, the Village Voice, Essence, and many other national magazines, as well as writing and producing television programs and feature films.