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.
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.