Everything about Black Power Movement totally explained
Black Power is a movement among
Black people throughout the world, especially those 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 earliest known usage of the term came from a 1954 book by
Richard Wright titled
"Black Power." The first use of the term in a political sense may have been by
Robert F. Williams, an
NAACP chapter president, writer, and publisher of the 1950s and 1960s. New York politician
Adam Clayton Powell used the term on
May 29,
1966 during a baccalaureate address at the
Howard University: "To demand these God-given rights is to seek black power."
The first official use of the term "Black Power" as a social and political slogan was by
Kwame Ture (then known as Stokely Carmichael) and
Mukasa Dada (then known as Willie Ricks), both organizers and spokespersons for the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). On June 16, 1966, after the shooting of
James Meredith during the
March Against Fear,
Stokely Carmichael said:
"This is the twenty-seventh time I've 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!"
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.
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
Kwame Ture, 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 wouldn't "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.
Civil Rights leaders also believed in agitation, but most didn't believe in physically violent retaliation.
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".
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 isn't the white man's birthright; it won't be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages."
Positions
Advocates of black power generally argue that the
assimilation or
integration robs
black people 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's an act of
treason.
Today, most black power advocates have not changed their self-sufficiency argument. Racism still exists worldwide and it's generally accepted that blacks in the United States, on the whole, didn't assimilate into U.S. "mainstream" culture either by King's integration measures or by the self-sufficiency measures of black power. Some argue that blacks became more oppressed, this time partially by "their own" people in a new black strata of the
middle class and the
ruling class or through
colorism. 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.
Impact
Although the concept remained imprecise and contested and included people ranging from businesspeople who used it to push black capitalism to revolutionaries who sought an end to
capitalism, Black Power exerted a significant influence. It helped organize scores of community self-help groups and institutions that didn't depend on whites. It was used to establish
black studies programs at colleges, to mobilizes black voters to elect black candidates, and to encourage greater racial pride and self-esteem.
Black is beautiful
United States of America beginning in the 1960s that aims to dispel the widespread notion that
black people's natural features such as skin color, facial features and hair are inherently ugly.
John Sweat Rock was the first to coin the famous phrase "Black is Beautiful." The movement asked that men and women stop
straightening their hair and attempting to
lighten or bleach their skin. The prevailing idea in
American culture was that black features were less attractive or desirable than white features. The movement is largely responsible for the popularity of the
Afro. Most importantly, it gave a generation of African Americans the courage to feel good about who they're and how they look.
Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement or
BAM is the artistic branch of the
Black Power movement founded in Harlem by writer and activist
Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoy Jones). This movement inspired blacks to establish ownership of publishing houses, magazines, journals and art institutions. Other well-known writers that were involved with this movement included
Nikki Giovanni,
Sonia Sanchez,
Maya Angelou, and Rosa Grey. Although not strictly involved with the Movement, other notable African American writers such as novelists
Ishmael Reed and
Toni Morrison can be considered to share some of its artistic and thematic concerns.
Ishmael Reed, who is considered neither a movement apologist nor advocate said "I wasn't invited to participate because I was considered an integrationist" but he went on to explain the positive aspects of the Black Arts Movement and the Black Power movement:
I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don't have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.
Criticism
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, Rustin 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's calculated to destroy them and their movement.”
Further Information
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