AHC/WI: Black Hippie-like, back to the land/rural commune type movement...

Some of the later posts in this thread (the ones on Sufism and hippies in particular) got me thinking.
The 60s and 70s counterculture had black elements, but more civil rights, black power associated and very urban, as compared to the primarily white hippies and yippies.

But some black power/nationalists subcultures did have elements that might possibly have gone in that direction. John Africa's MOVE, while still very urban based, has a lot of belifes common to the hippie's "back to the land" ideals - raw foodism, radical environmentalism, some stong Luddite elements. Rastafarianism has some as well, like vegetarianism, cannabis use, rejection of materialism.

I thought it might be interesting to have a movement that might strengthen some of those elements and broaden them.

What might it take to get a strong black nationalism/power movement directed away from urban areas and more back to nature/the land oriented? And what might it look like?
 
I'm not any sort of authority on African American culture, but it would seem to me that you have basically two possible routes here...

1. Have blacks be MORE assimilated into white, middle-class culture. Black youth would then be more susceptible to the appeal of the hippie back-to-nature movement.

2. Have blacks be LESS assimilated into whote, middle-class culture, or at least the more urban variants of it, and thus maintaining a closer connection to their agrarian cultural roots, which can be harnessed in the search to construct a plausible black counterculture.
 
Also, you could maybe have the Back-To-Africa movement do better than it did in OTL, with a heavy focus on the more agaraian experiments in post-colonial Africa(Nyerere's Ujamma, for eg.) This could create interest in establishing ostensibly similar projects in the USA, especially among blacks unable to afford trans-Atlantic plane fare.
 
I think one of the problems is going to be that at least for blacks in the US slavery was overwhelmingly associated with working on the land. So you might manage some sort of back-to-Africa movement that does this, but one within the US is going to be very hard without a very early PoD indeed.
 
I think one of the problems is going to be that at least for blacks in the US slavery was overwhelmingly associated with working on the land. So you might manage some sort of back-to-Africa movement that does this, but one within the US is going to be very hard without a very early PoD indeed.

I dunno. I think it could have some appeal if it emphasized black OWNERSHIP(probably communal) of the land.

What I'm thinking here is that Maoism and other variants of East Asian Communism obtained support by styling themselves as pro-agrarian, even thought the peasants in those countries would have had some pretty bitter experiences under feudalism.
 
I dunno. I think it could have some appeal if it emphasized black OWNERSHIP(probably communal) of the land.

What I'm thinking here is that Maoism and other variants of East Asian Communism obtained support by styling themselves as pro-agrarian, even thought the peasants in those countries would have had some pretty bitter experiences under feudalism.

A big difference there is that blacks in the US were largely urbanized unlike the Chinese peasantry.

A thought that might work - pastoralism. Lots of traditional pastoralismin Africa. And in the post Civil War period, there were plenty of blacks on the frontier.
Maybe in the amalgam of black power someone takes on the Maasai's idea that all the cattle in the world were given to them.
 
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