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Black Power
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Black Power is a political slogan and a name for various associated ideologies. It is used in the movement among black people throughout the world, primarily 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.
"Black Power" expresses a range of political goals, from defense against racial oppression, to the establishment of separate social institutions and a self-sufficient economy (separatism).
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Black Power is a political slogan and a name for various associated ideologies. It is used in the movement among black people throughout the world, primarily 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.
"Black Power" expresses a range of political goals, from defense against racial oppression, to the establishment of separate social institutions and a self-sufficient economy (separatism). Some people, generally those occupying positions of privilege in society claim that Black Power is based on racial supremacy and ethnocentric hegemony though this is not generally true. The earliest known usage of the term is found in 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 Howard University: "To demand these God-given rights is to seek black power."
The first 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 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!"
Black Power adherents believe in Black autonomy, with a variety of tendencies such as black nationalism, and black separatism. Often Black Power advocates are open to use violence as a means of achieving their aims, but this openess to violence was nearly always coupled with community organizing work. 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 (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 racist people had no qualms about the use of violence against black people in the U.S. who would not "stay in their place," and that "accommodationist" civil rights strategies had failed to secure sufficient concessions for black people. 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 did not 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 is not the white man's birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages."
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 did not depend on whites. It was used to force black studies programs at colleges, to mobilize black voters to elect black candidates, and to encourage greater racial pride and self-esteem.
Black is beautiful
Black is beautiful is a cultural movement in the United States of America beginning in the 1960s that aims to dispel the 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 (and arguably still is) that black features are 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 are 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 black people to establish ownership of publishing houses, magazines, journals and art institutions. Other well-known writers who were involved with this movement included Nikki Giovanni; Don L. Lee, later known as Haki Madhubuti; Sonia Sanchez; Maya Angelou; Dudley Randall; Sterling Plumpp; Larry Neal; Ted Joans; Ahmos Zu-Bolton; and Etheridge Knight. Several black-owned publishing houses and publications sprang from the BAM, including Madhubuti's Third World Press, Broadside Press, Zu-Bolton's Energy Black South Press, and the periodicals Callaloo and Yardbird Reader. Although not strictly involved with the Movement, other notable African American writers such as novelists Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison and poet Gwendolyn Brooks 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 [...] 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 is calculated to destroy them and their movement.”
See also
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Further reading
- Carmichael, Stokely/ Hamilton, Charles V.: Black Power. The Politics of Liberation in America, Vintage, New York, 1967.
- Breitman, George. . International Socialist Review Jan-Feb 1967, from microfilm archives. Transcribed & marked up by Andrew Pollack for the . 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 Antonio.
- Brown, Scot, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism, NYU Press, New York, 2003.
- Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2004.
External links
- , Director of the Radical Information Project and Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland
- , Professor of African-American Studies - Scholar of African American history and frequent commentator on civil rights, race and democracy issues
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