Malcolm’s death, Stokely’s rise, and Vietnam radicalized Martin Luther King, Jr. King imbibed aspects of Black Power while rejecting any hints of violence. King’s most robust antiwar speeches followed Carmichael’s lead at Berkeley, and on April 15, 1967, at the largest antiwar demonstration, at the time, in American history, they shared the stage outside the United Nations. Black Power forced King, the prince of peace, to acknowledge that his own nation was “the biggest purveyor of violence in the world.” The sentiment poisoned King’s relationship with President Lyndon Johnson and galvanized racist opposition against civil rights and Black Power activism.
The Black Panthers mixed revolutionary Black nationalism, socialism, and Marxism into a daring blend of revolutionary politics that, over time, galvanized millions of activists around the world. The group’s ten-point program called for an end to police brutality, poverty, failing schools, and racism. Panther leaders including Kathleen Cleaver, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Elaine Brown became icons of an interpretation of Black Power that viewed revolution as based more on class than race. In 1968 Carmichael emerged as the “honorary prime minister” of the Black Panther Party as part of his efforts to help free imprisoned minister of defense Huey P. Newton. The Panther-SNCC alliance proved to be short-lived, riven by political and ideological differences. A little more than a year later, Carmichael resigned his affiliation with the group. By this time, Carmichael had married the South African singer Miriam Makeba and relocated to Conakry, Guinea, where he studied under former Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s own Sékou Touré. Always ready for revolution, Carmichael (who would adopt the name Kwame Ture in honor of both political leaders) now considered pan-Africanism to be the highest stage of Black Power and vowed to spread that political message from the continent itself.
By 1969, Black Power had redefined the contours of the Black freedom struggle. Black Power radicalism influenced and helped shape Black Panthers in California and New Haven serving poor Black children free breakfast, welfare rights organizers in New Orleans, college and high school students in New York City, and Black feminists such as Angela Davis, Frances Beal, and members of the Third World Women’s Alliance. Mainstream politics noticed: President Richard Nixon supported “Black capitalism” while Black Power and Urban League head Whitney Young belatedly championed the phrase after initially denouncing it. “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud!” by soul singer James Brown became a catchphrase that popularized one aspect of a movement that Malcolm X had helped birth only a few years before.
Black Power survived its heyday to be institutionalized in American popular and political culture in the rise of Black elected officials, the development of Black studies programs in higher education, the spread of Black History Month, and the deeply ingrained and globally Black political consciousness that informs contemporary Black-led social movements. Black Power sought universality, however imperfectly, from the lived experiences of Black people. BLM activists have done the same by linking an expansive definition of freedom and global citizenship to movements to end mass incarceration, racial violence, sexism, environmental racism, public school and residential segregation, and inequality in every facet of American life. In doing so, they have built on both Malcolm X’s and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s notions of Black dignity and Black citizenship. They have radically expanded these political frameworks by centering the most marginalized Black identities as the beating heart of a new, more inclusive struggle. It is a holistic struggle for human rights that seeks universal justice through the lens of Black people’s historic oppression and struggle for self-determination, culminating in the long-overdue quest for Black power.
1969–1974
PROPERTY
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
The summer of 1968 saw the most far-reaching and historic changes to housing policy in American history. In the days after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, Congress finally passed a federal fair housing law to ban all forms of racist discrimination in the rental or sale of housing. Then in June the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Jones v. Mayer that all racist discrimination in housing must immediately end.
In a departure from most legal decisions regarding racist discrimination, the Court rooted its actions in the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery, as opposed to the Fourteenth Amendment, which called for equal treatment. It argued that residential segregation was redolent of slavery in its collective exclusion of African Americans from the benefits of freedom, including the right to move about in whichever way they saw fit.
In August 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law one of his last major bills aimed at curing the so-called urban crisis. Many envisioned the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 as a tool to produce an unprecedented 26 million units of new and rehabilitated housing within ten years. In addition to the creation of millions of units of housing, the centerpiece of the legislation was a new low-income homeownership program, administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The legislation did not specify that it was targeting African Americans, but the acute urban housing crisis had been a catalyst for the urban uprisings.
The homeownership program had been partly inspired by an earlier effort in 1967 among life insurance executives who formed a consortium to create a billion-dollar mortgage pool that was intended to finance Black businesses, apartment developments, and single-family housing in areas that would, under normal circumstances, have been redlined. They called their organization the Joint Committee on Urban Problems. By the fall of 1969, they had pledged another $1 billion to continue to create more housing opportunities for African Americans in the “urban core.”
The changes in U.S. housing policy during the late 1960s and early ’70s seemed to open to Black Americans the possibility of meaningful citizenship and real access to the riches of the country’s economy. This historic shift in policy had been made possible by the end of federal redlining by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). In the two decades after World War II, the FHA had become well known for championing suburban development around the white nuclear family. Now the FHA was poised to use its power and influence to develop Black communities within American cities. This shift from exclusion to inclusion of African Americans also fit with President Richard Nixon’s stated goal to develop Black capitalism in the cities.
Beneath the rosy talk about urban “redevelopment,” Black capitalism, and homeownership, however, the commitment to inequality, exploitation, and residential segregation continued. While new forms of finance capital were allowed into the cities to fund new initiatives, African Americans did not have the mobility to leave. Exclusionary zoning in suburbs and the commitment to racist business practices by bankers and real estate brokers kept Black buyers and renters confined to urban spaces or to new but still segregated suburban spaces. The predominant role of real estate and banks in the production of the new and rehabilitated housing, as well as the low-income homeownership program, invariably tied the racist business practices of these businesses to federal housing policy.