And this violence was protected by local and state authority. The reluctance of the federal government to provide any protection is also an important and too often ignored part of this story. The civil rights movement is in many ways best described as a slow process during which organizers learned to dig in and win enough trust with people to challenge a system—and system must be emphasized here—that had been in place virtually since the Civil War.
The Black Belt communities, however, were not entirely or even mostly submissive to white terror. There was strength beneath the surface. As the civil rights movement reached these rural communities where Black people were concentrated, residents on plantations and in small towns chose carefully, reading the political climate surrounding their lives with the same care they used to anticipate weather or crops. Not until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act did Black people in significant numbers begin to show up at county courthouses to register to vote. Still, even at less visible levels, they gave support, sometimes only verbal. They fed organizers in their homes and protected them, sometimes with weapons. They opened church doors. World War II and Korean War veterans were especially supportive of the movement. Having been told that they were fighting for freedom and democracy overseas, they were unwilling to accept anything less at home.
We are now in another era of intense activism, shaped by young movements such as Black Lives Matter. The political work and grassroots organizing of civil rights activists of the 1950s and ’60s paved the way.
1964–1969
BLACK POWER
Peniel Joseph
I first encountered Black Power through Malcolm X. As a junior high school student in New York City during the 1980s, I saw his image while watching the extraordinary Eyes on the Prize television documentary.
Malcolm’s bold critique of white supremacy, Western colonialism, and anti-Black racial violence embodied the Black Power movement. All this seemed to contrast with the passionate call for Black citizenship through nonviolent suffering extolled by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., another figure covered extensively in the documentary.
Contemporary social justice movements, ranging from Black Lives Matter (BLM) to efforts to end mass incarceration, stand on the shoulders of Black Power activists who led a sprawling, intersectional, multigenerational human rights movement whose universal call for justice has been obscured by its basis in the particular struggle of Black people.
Malcolm X represents Black Power’s most crucial avatar. On August 20, 1964, Malcolm appeared at the Organization of African Unity’s Cairo conference, where he lobbied African heads of state to publicly denounce America’s mistreatment of Blacks as a human rights violation. The most vocal opponent of white supremacy of his generation, Malcolm defined Black Power as a radical movement for political, economic, and cultural self-determination, one rooted in anticolonial, antiracist, and anti-imperial politics. Malcolm challenged the Black community—most pointedly King and other civil rights activists—to reimagine the struggle for Black citizenship as part of a global pan-African and human rights struggle.
Although Black Power would burst onto the national stage with Stokely Carmichael’s call for “Black Power!” in the evening humidity of Greenwood, Mississippi, two years later, Malcolm gave the movement its shape, texture, and framework. He did so through his unrelenting pursuit of Black dignity both as a member of the Nation of Islam and as an independent organizer of the Muslim Mosque Incorporated and the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
After Malcolm’s February 21, 1965, assassination in New York City, Black Power’s visibility grew exponentially. Thousands of Black students, activists, and ordinary citizens drawn to Malcolm’s call for political self-determination created study groups, Black student unions, and independent political parties with the goal of achieving citizenship through political power, racial solidarity, and cultural transformation. Historical events accelerated the already-fertile political context. The signing of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) on August 6, 1965, marked the high point of the heroic period of the modern civil rights movement. And yet landmark legislation proved ineffective in the face of the depth and breadth of racial injustice in America. Less than a week after the VRA was signed into law, Watts, Los Angeles, exploded in violence after police assaulted a Black man accused of theft, exposing the face of police brutality, segregation, racial violence, and poverty.
Urban rebellions in major American cities inspired protest, political organizing, and poetry. The Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS), founded in 1965 by the activist-poet Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), culled aspects of Malcolm’s call for pride, dignity, and self-love into a cultural movement that was determined to reimagine Black history and culture as an antiracist political weapon capable of defeating injustice and nourishing wounded Black souls. The Black Arts movement introduced the world to the brilliant writings of Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Neal, and Haki Madhubuti, extraordinary artists who redefined the contours of Black identity for subsequent generations.
On June 16, 1966, Stokely Carmichael, a community organizer and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, emerged as the brash, telegenic face of Black Power. Trinidadian born, raised in the Bronx, and sanctified in the early civil rights struggles that found him celebrating his twentieth birthday on a Mississippi prison farm, Carmichael underwent a remarkable transformation from a civil rights militant who deeply admired King and the social-democratic peace activist Bayard Rustin, into the best-known radical activist of his generation. Following his release from the prison in Greenwood, Mississippi, for trying to put up a tent during a three-week civil rights march through the Magnolia State, Carmichael unleashed the speech that changed his life and the movement. “This is the twenty-seventh time that I’ve been arrested,” Carmichael told a crowd of six hundred. “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 saying now is Black Power!”
Black Power scandalized the nation, with whites interpreting the cry as a call for retribution and Blacks instantly embracing the slogan as an opportunity for political self-determination. Carmichael emerged as a major leader, intellectual, and celebrity: the Black Power movement’s rock star. Black Power increased his personal access to, and political disagreements with, Martin Luther King, Jr.
In October 1966, at the University of California in Berkeley, Carmichael linked Black Power, the Vietnam War, and the struggles against white supremacy and imperialism to a larger and global freedom movement that electrified the New Left. He offered a blueprint for Black radicals to internationalize the movement and set the stage for the emergence of some of the era’s most important political groups, most notably the Black Panthers. Black Power activists paid a steep cost for openly advocating an antiracist political revolution in America and around the world. Local, state, federal, and international surveillance and police agencies that once stalked Malcolm and Martin now shadowed Stokely and the wider movement, deploying counterintelligence measures that monitored, harassed, imprisoned, and at times led to the deaths of scores of activists.