Empowering the Black Power Movement
USHistory.org
On June 5, 1966, the Civil Rights Movement's James Meredith was shot in an ambush as he attempted to complete a peaceful solo "March Against Fear" from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. Meredith had already made national headlines in 1962 by becoming the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
Civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Floyd McKissick of CORE, and Stokely Carmichael of SNCC rushed to Meredith's hospital bed. They determined that his march must be completed. As Carmichael and McKissick walked through Mississippi, they observed that when it came to race relations, little had changed despite federal legislation.
Local townspeople harassed the marchers while the police turned a blind eye or arrested the activists as troublemakers.
At a mass rally, Carmichael uttered the simple statement: "What we need is black power." Crowds chanted the phrase as a slogan, and a movement began to flower.
Carmichael and McKissick were heavily influenced by the words of Malcolm X and rejected integration as a short-term goal. Carmichael felt that blacks needed to feel a sense of racial pride and self-respect before any meaningful gains could be achieved. He encouraged the strengthening of African American communities without the help of whites.
Chapters of SNCC and CORE - both integrated organizations - began to reject white membership as Carmichael abandoned peaceful resistance. Martin Luther King Jr. and the NAACP denounced black power as the proper forward path. But black power was a powerful message in the streets of urban America, where resentment boiled and tempers flared.
Soon, African American students began to celebrate African American culture boldly and publicly. Colleges teemed with young blacks wearing traditional African colors and clothes. Soul singer James Brown had his audience chanting "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud." Hairstyles unique to African Americans became popular and youths proclaimed, "Black is Beautiful!"
That same year, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale took Carmichael's advice one step further. They formed the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Openly brandishing weapons, the Panthers decided to take control of their own neighborhoods to aid their communities and to resist police brutality. Soon the Panthers spread across the nation.
The Black Panther Party borrowed many tenets from socialist movements, including Mao Zedong's famous creed "Political power comes through the barrel of a gun." The Panthers and the police exchanged gunshots on American streets as white Americans viewed the growing militancy with increasing alarm. Newton himself was arrested in October of 1968 after he was involved in a shootout with police that left an officer dead. Despite the escalation in violence around the country, the Black Panther Party kept growing.
The peaceful Civil Rights Movement was dealt a severe blow in the spring of 1968. On the morning of April 4, King was gunned down by a white assassin named James Earl Ray. Riots spread through American cities as African Americans mourned the death of their most revered leader. Black power advocates saw the murder as another sign that white power must be met with similar force. As the decade came to a close, there were few remaining examples of legal discrimination. But across the land, de facto segregation loomed large. Many schools were hardly integrated and African Americans struggled to claim their fair share of the economic pie.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement led by CORE, SNCC, and NAACP achieved much with their nonviolent civil disobedience methods in regards to ending Jim Crow laws and supporting integration laws. But the 1970s would belong to the Black Power movement.
Civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Floyd McKissick of CORE, and Stokely Carmichael of SNCC rushed to Meredith's hospital bed. They determined that his march must be completed. As Carmichael and McKissick walked through Mississippi, they observed that when it came to race relations, little had changed despite federal legislation.
Local townspeople harassed the marchers while the police turned a blind eye or arrested the activists as troublemakers.
At a mass rally, Carmichael uttered the simple statement: "What we need is black power." Crowds chanted the phrase as a slogan, and a movement began to flower.
Carmichael and McKissick were heavily influenced by the words of Malcolm X and rejected integration as a short-term goal. Carmichael felt that blacks needed to feel a sense of racial pride and self-respect before any meaningful gains could be achieved. He encouraged the strengthening of African American communities without the help of whites.
Chapters of SNCC and CORE - both integrated organizations - began to reject white membership as Carmichael abandoned peaceful resistance. Martin Luther King Jr. and the NAACP denounced black power as the proper forward path. But black power was a powerful message in the streets of urban America, where resentment boiled and tempers flared.
Soon, African American students began to celebrate African American culture boldly and publicly. Colleges teemed with young blacks wearing traditional African colors and clothes. Soul singer James Brown had his audience chanting "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud." Hairstyles unique to African Americans became popular and youths proclaimed, "Black is Beautiful!"
That same year, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale took Carmichael's advice one step further. They formed the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Openly brandishing weapons, the Panthers decided to take control of their own neighborhoods to aid their communities and to resist police brutality. Soon the Panthers spread across the nation.
The Black Panther Party borrowed many tenets from socialist movements, including Mao Zedong's famous creed "Political power comes through the barrel of a gun." The Panthers and the police exchanged gunshots on American streets as white Americans viewed the growing militancy with increasing alarm. Newton himself was arrested in October of 1968 after he was involved in a shootout with police that left an officer dead. Despite the escalation in violence around the country, the Black Panther Party kept growing.
The peaceful Civil Rights Movement was dealt a severe blow in the spring of 1968. On the morning of April 4, King was gunned down by a white assassin named James Earl Ray. Riots spread through American cities as African Americans mourned the death of their most revered leader. Black power advocates saw the murder as another sign that white power must be met with similar force. As the decade came to a close, there were few remaining examples of legal discrimination. But across the land, de facto segregation loomed large. Many schools were hardly integrated and African Americans struggled to claim their fair share of the economic pie.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement led by CORE, SNCC, and NAACP achieved much with their nonviolent civil disobedience methods in regards to ending Jim Crow laws and supporting integration laws. But the 1970s would belong to the Black Power movement.