Charles Vernon Hamilton was a political scientist, civil rights leader, and the W. S. Sayre Professor of Government and Political Science at Columbia University. He was a philosophical godfather of the Black Power movement, which he envisioned as the means to subvert what he stigmatized as America’s “institutional racism,” died on November 18, 2023, in Chicago, it was recently confirmed. He was 94.
A friend and colleague, the South African educator Wilmot James, said he learned of the death from a representative of Dr. Hamilton’s bank. Dr. Hamilton’s nephew Kevin Lacey said it had not been previously announced because Dr. Hamilton was a private and modest man and was “concerned about what would and would not happen upon his passing.”
Charles V. Hamilton was of the first African Americans to hold an endowed chair at an Ivy League university, Hamilton focused his research on urban politics and the Civil Rights movement.
In 1967, Dr. Hamilton, a political scientist at historically Black colleges, and Stokely Carmichael (who later adopted the name Kwame Ture), a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, discombobulated the multiracial anti-discrimination crusade that was radiating from the South to Northern cities at the time by publishing the manifesto “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation” by Charles V. Hamilton and Kwame Ture.
Dr. Hamilton published a biography, “Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma,” in 1991. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Dr. Hamilton’s “diligent scholarship has uncovered more than a good book’s worth of Powell material.”
Dr. Hamilton was active in the Association governance and on numerous committees during the 1970s-1990s. He served as the Vice President of the APSA Council, (1972-1973), and was a member of the Nominating Committee and the APSR Editorial Board, among other committees.
Related articles:
- The Legacy of Charles V. Hamilton and Black Power, The Atlantic
- Black Power: A Viable Alternative, Iowa Public Radio (IPR) — [Listen to Audio]
- Remembering Renowned Philosopher and Black Power Trailblazer Charles V. Hamilton, Washington Informer
- Dr. Charles V. Hamilton, an avatar of Black Power, passes at 94, New York Amsterdam News
- [Interview] Combining Teaching with Activism: An Interview with Charles V. Hamilton, Brown Political Review
- A Conversation with Charles V. Hamilton, AnnualReview.org [Watch online]
- From Muskogee to Morningside Heights: Political Scientist Charles V. Hamilton, Columbia University Magazine
- Charles V. Hamilton and Wilmot James Oral History Project, Columbia University Center for Oral History Research