The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1970, Charles M. Blow is an award-winning journalist and op-ed columnist for The New York Times. He is also the author of the 2014 memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones. He splits his time between his primary residence in Atlanta and his second home in New York City.

Blow spent the first years of his life with his grandparents in Kiblah, Arkansas, before permanently relocating to Gibsland, Louisiana. He graduated from Grambling State University, a historically Black university, then moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he worked for the Detroit News. In 1994, Blow joined The New York Times as a graphics director. He won an award for the newspaper’s graphic coverage of the September 11 attacks and the Iraq War. He joined National Geographic as its art director in 2006 before rejoining the Times as a columnist in 2008. He is also a frequent commentator on CNN.

In the years preceding the publication of The Devil You Know, Blow ruminated on what pathways Black people could take toward Black power. Even in the supposed “racial reckoning” that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Blow felt trepidation and resignation as he watched the anger translate into nothing substantive (1-2). Dissatisfied with the lack of progress from protests and leaders he felt kowtowed to the system (3), he set out to develop an agenda defined by its big ideas, explaining, “I had to remember that a big idea could change the course of history” (41).

Taking to heart Harry Belafonte’s call for “radical thinking,” Blow created his theory of Black regionalism (128), which called for the colonization of the South by Black people, for Black people. Through mass migration to a particular set of states, Black people could create such population density that they would constitute a majority of the electorate, thereby guaranteeing their control of regional state governments and commanding a larger political presence in Congress. In this capacity, Black people could create the spaces and communities they so desperately need to nurture and encourage Blackness.