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In the "The 'Long Movement' as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies" Clarence Lang and I critiqued the "long movement thesis" (Journal of African American History Vol. 92, No. 2 Spring 2007, 265-88). Applying new social movement theory to the Black Liberation movement this presentation offers a counter conceptual framework to the "long movement thesis" I argue that the Black freedom struggle is more usefully conceptualized as a series of waves, of rising tides and ebbing waters, than as one continuous social movement. In this schema, each wave constitutes a particular phase of the Black Liberation movement, one that is intimately related to its previous and subsequent expressions, but also representative of a distinct movement in the sense of organizations, ideologies, strategies, practices, discourses and symbols. The wave metaphor best captures the constancy and the discontinuous character of the African American struggle for freedom, justice, self-determination, and social transformation. I locate the origin of the modern Black liberation movement in the sociohistorical movement that historian Rayford Logan called the Nadir (1877-1917), a period in which the United States was rapidly transforming to industrial monopoly capitalism and launching imperialist forays beyond the continental boundaries of North America. Meanwhile African Americans were being incorporated into a racial formation, the semi-capitalist labor relations of the Plantation Economy, which was buttressed by massive political repression and racial terror. Responding to a surge in pogroms, lynching, disfranchisement, revocation of civil rights and rampant caricatures, in the midst of the nadir, around the 1890s, African Americans began to fight back by building a plethora of new national organizations. Led by the formation of the Colored Farmers Association, the National Afro-American League, National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, and the National Association of Colored Women, Blacks waged an heroic but largely ineffective struggle against white terrorist "redeemers" and negligent federal state. From its beginning in the 1890s formation of national Black social movement organizations, I chart six overlapping waves of the Black Liberation movement: (1) Accommodation, 1890-1915; (2) The New Negro Movement, 1904-1935; (3) Gradual Reformism, 1936-1954; (4) Mass Direct Action and Civil Disobedience, 1955-1968; (5) Black Power, 1966-1978; and (6) Electoralism, 1965-P. Though each wave is characterized by a diverse Black counterpublic that projects a multiplicity of political visions and advocates several strategies, each is also dominated by a leading strategy and ideology, the basis upon which I have named that wave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]