NYT columnist Charles Blow writing ‘Black Power Manifesto’

New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow is working on a book he had not planned to write.

“The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto” will be published in February, Harper announced Wednesday. Blow will combine political history and personal reflections for a “race book” he felt compelled to take on amid the coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matters protests.

“At its base, equality is about power: equal access to it, equal treatment by it and equal control over it,” Blow said in a statement. “The time is at an end for Black people begging and pleading, marching and chanting, for an equitable stake in that power. The time has come to simply assume it, to use the Constitution itself as the vehicle. I have written this book not as a meditation on race, not as a protestation, but as a plan. A manifesto.”

Blow, 49, has been a Times op-ed columnist since 2008. He is also the author of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” a memoir released in 2014.