Black Power

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Tommie Smith (gold medal) and John Carlos (bronze medal) famously performed the Black Power salute on the 200 m winners podium at the 1968 Olympics.

Black Power was a political movement, most prominent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that strove to express a new racial consciousness among blacks in the United States. More generally, the term refers to a conscious choice on the part of blacks to nurture and promote their collective interests, advance their own values, and secure their own well-being and some measure of autonomy, rather than permit others to shape their futures and agendas. The first person to use the term Black Power in its political context was Robert F. Williams, a writer and publisher of the 1950s and '60s. Mukasa Dada (then known as Willie Ricks), an organizer and spokesperson for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), won the support of thousands of working-class blacks when he shouted "black power" at a time when the focus on racial integration, originally seen by some blacks as a strategic choice, had become an end in itself in more moderate circles.

The focus of black power advocates was not integration or any other single strategy. Rather, it was improving the status of black people.

Internationalist offshoots of black power include African Internationalism, pan-Africanism, black nationalism and some elements of black supremacy. Meanwhile, some black power activists within the United States, calling themselves "New Africans", believe that U.S. blacks should have their own independent nation-state comprised of the Black Belt South.

[edit] Background

See also: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

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]

"Black Power!" as a slogan appears to have originated with Carmichael during the 1966 March Against Fear in Mississippi:

"This is the 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]

[edit] Black Power 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 Black Power group. Another fairly well-known group espousing most of the philosophies common to Black Power are the New Black Panthers. Some of the groups espousing the slogan are considered^{[citation needed]} "black racist" in nature.

[edit] Criticisms of Black Power

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More moderate critics of Black Power often remark that African-Americans are no longer truly "African", since this group is almost completely Western in its cultural orientations. These critics say that blacks are indeed "as American as apple pie and baseball",^{[citation needed]} that the toil of their ancestors helped to lay the foundations of the United States, and that blacks are therefore neither less nor more than full citizens entitled to all rights guaranteed therein.

More severe criticisms levelled at Black Power have come from the Radical Left, anti-nationalists, communists and others who oppose identity politics^{[citation needed]}. These forces, particularly the communist ones^{[citation needed]}, say that Black Power is dangerous to proletarian internationalism. However this position is increasingly rare and in more recent years the far left have largely embraced identity politics.^{[citation needed]}

Criticism of this phrase also charges that it is hypocritical for this phrase to be accepted as an ideology that represents empowerment and unity, whereas the phrase White Power is almost universally considered as a racist phrase.

[edit] See also

• Afro
• Black anarchism
• New Black Panthers
• Black Panther Party
• Stokely Carmichael
• Eldridge Cleaver
• Marcus Garvey
• Huey P. Newton
• Bobby Seale
• SNCC
• Black Power (New Zealand)
• African independence movements
• National-Anarchism

Compare

• White Power
• White supremacy and Black supremacy
• White pride and Black pride
• White nationalism and Black nationalism
• White separatism and Black separatism
• Neo-Nazism

[edit] 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 ]

[edit] External links

• 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.
• Hubert Harrison
• Ben Fletcher
• Pan African: Information
• Afro Diaspora: Information