Discover

(Redirected from Black Power Movement)


'Black Power' was a political movement among persons of African descent throughout the world, though it is often associated primarily with African Americans in the United States. Most prominent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the movement emphasized racial pride and the creation of black political and cultural institutions to nurture and promote black collective interests, advance black values, and secure black autonomy.
The first person to use the term "Black Power" in a political context was Robert F. Williams, an NAACP chapter president, writer, and publisher of the 1950s and 1960s. However the first usage of "Black Power" as a slogan is generally credited to Mukasa Dada (then known as Willie Ricks) and Stokely Carmichael, both organizers and spokespersons for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Some, though not all, Black Power adherents believed in racial separation, black nationalism, and the necessity to use violence as a means of achieving their aims. Such positions were for the most part in direct conflict with those of leaders of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, and thus the two movements have often been viewed as inherently antagonistic. However certain groups and individuals participated in both civil rights and black power activism.
Internationalist offshoots of black power include African Internationalism, pan-Africanism, black nationalism and black supremacy.

Contents

Background

Positions

Criticisms

See also

Notes

Further reading

External links

Background

The movement for Black Power in the U.S. came during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Many members of SNCC, among them Stokely Carmichael, were becoming critical of the nonviolent approach to racism and inequality articulated and practiced by King, the NAACP and other moderates, and rejected desegregation as a primary objective.
SNCC's membership was generally younger than that of the other Big Five civil rights organizations, and became increasingly more militant and outspoken over time. SNCC also saw racists had no qualms about the use of violence against blacks in the U.S. who would not "stay in their place," and that "accommodationist" civil rights strategies had failed to secure sufficient concessions for blacks. As a result, as the Civil Rights Movement progressed, increasingly radical, more militant voices came to the fore to aggressively challenge white hegemony. Increasing numbers of black youth, particularly, had come to reject the moderate path of cooperation, integration and assimilation of their elders. They rejected the notion of appealing to the public's conscience and religious creeds and took the tack articulated by another black activist more than a century before. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote:

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. ...Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.^[1]

Civil Rights leaders also believed in agitation, but most did not believe in physically violent retaliation.
"Black Power" as a slogan appears to have originated with Carmichael during the 1966 March Against Fear in Mississippi:

"This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain't going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin' us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin' now is Black Power!"

Over the remainder of the march, there was a division between those aligned with Martin Luther King, Jr. and those aligned with Carmichael, marked by their respective slogans, "Freedom Now" and "Black Power".^[2]
While King never endorsed the slogan, his rhetoric sometimes came close to it. In his 1967 book ''Where Do We Go From Here?'', King wrote that "power is not the white man's birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages."^[3]

Positions

Advocates of black power generally argue that the assimilation or integration robs Africans (which includes African-Americans) of their dignity and heritage. Omali Yeshitela, leader of the Uhuru Movement and Chairman of the African People's Socialist Party, argues that Africans historically have fought to protect their lands, cultures and freedoms from European colonialists, and that to seek to integrate into a society that has stolen one's people and their wealth is more than the Marxist critique of "uniting with imperialism"; it is an act of treason.
Today, most black power advocates have not changed their self-sufficiency argument. Racism still exists worldwide and it is generally accepted that blacks in the United States, on the whole, did not assimilate into U.S. "mainstream" culture either by King's integration measures or by the self-sufficiency measures of black power — rather, blacks arguably became evermore oppressed, this time partially by "their own" people in a new black strata of the middle class and the ruling class or through colorism. African American Christianity may also play a part in black oppression through the use of a religion introduced by white missionaries who looked down on native African religions. Slave owners later used Christianity to ensure faithful service and obedience from their slaves. Black power's advocates generally argue that the reason for this stalemate and further oppression of the vast majority of U.S. blacks is because Black Power's objectives have not had the opportunity to be fully carried through.
The Nation of Islam is perhaps the best-known contemporary Black Power group. Another fairly well-known group espousing most of the philosophies common to Black Power are the New Black Panthers.

Criticisms

Bayard Rustin, an elder statesman of the Civil Rights Movement, was a harsh critic of Black Power in its earliest days. Writing in 1966, shortly after the March Against Fear, Randolph said that Black Power “not only lacks any real value for the civil rights movement, but that its propagation is positively harmful. It diverts the movement from a meaningful debate over strategy and tactics, it isolates the Negro community, and it encourages the growth of anti-Negro forces.” He particularly criticized the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and SNCC for their turn toward Black Power, arguing that these two organizations once “awakened the country, but now they emerge isolated and demoralized, shouting a slogan that may afford a momentary satisfaction but that is calculated to destroy them and their movement.”^[4]
Some members of the far left (including anti-nationalists, communists and others who oppose identity politics) have also criticized the Black Power concept.. These forces, particularly the communist ones, say that Black Power is dangerous to proletarian internationalism. However this position is increasingly rare and in more recent years the far left has largely embraced identity politics.

See also

★ African independence movements

★ Afro

★ Black anarchism

★ Black Arts Movement

★ Black Panthers

★ Stokely Carmichael

★ Eldridge Cleaver

★ Marcus Garvey

★ New Black Panthers

★ Huey P. Newton

★ Republic of New Africa

★ Bobby Seale

★ SNCC
;Compare

★ Black Power (New Zealand)

★ National-Anarchism

★ White Power

★ White supremacy and Black supremacy

★ White pride and Black pride

★ White nationalism and Black nationalism

★ White separatism and Black separatism

Notes

1. ''Organizing For Social Change: A Mandate For Activity In The 1990s.'' Douglass, Frederick. Letter to an abolitionist associate (1857). In ''Organizing for Social Change: A Mandate For Activity In The 1990s''. Bobo, K.; Randall, J.; and Max, S., eds. Cabin John, Maryland: Seven Locks Press (1991).
2. Scott Saul, "On the Lower Frequencies: Rethinking the Black Power movement" p.92-98 in ''Harper's'', December 2006. p. 94
3. Cited in Scott Saul, "On the Lower Frequencies", p.95
4. http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/swp-us/bpower.htm

Further reading

★ Breitman, George. ''In Defense of Black Power''. 'International Socialist Review' Jan-Feb 1967, from Tamiment Library microfilm archives. Transcribed & marked up by Andrew Pollack for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line. Retrieved May 2, 2005.

★ Salas, Mario Marcel. Masters Thesis: Patterns of Persistence: Paternal Colonialist Structures and the Radical Opposition in the African American Community in San Antonio, 1937-2001, University of Texas at San Antonio.

★ Brown, Scot, ''Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism,'' NYU Press, New York, 2003.

External links

★ Website of Dr. Christian Davenport, Director of the Radical Information Project and Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland

★ Website of Dr. Peniel E. Joseph, Professor of African-American Studies - Scholar of African American history and frequent commentator on civil rights, race and democracy issues

★ The Immortal Birth Book, Gods & Earths

★ The official website of the New Black Panther Party.

★ Black Youth Empowerment

★ Hubert Harrison

★ Ben Fletcher

★ Pan African: Information

★ Afro Diaspora: Information

★ Children of the Revolutionary