The slogan and movement, popularized in 1966, calling for Black political and economic self-determination, racial pride, and independent institutions.
The phrase was not new — the novelist Richard Wright had titled a 1954 book Black Power — but it became a national rallying cry on 16 June 1966. During the March Against Fear, begun after James Meredith was shot on 6 June while walking through Mississippi, SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael was arrested in Greenwood. Released hours later, and encouraged by fellow organizer Willie Ricks, he told a rally of some 1,500 marchers: “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin. What we got to start saying now is Black Power!”
Carmichael had absorbed the idea in Lowndes County, Alabama, where in 1965 SNCC organizers found a county that was about 80 percent Black but had virtually no Black registered voters. Rather than join the white-controlled Democratic Party, local activists led by John Hulett formed the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in 1966. State law required a party emblem, and they chose a black panther. In Carmichael’s account, written with Charles V. Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967), the phrase was a call for Black communities to build political and economic power of their own and to control their own institutions.
The slogan divided the movement. Martin Luther King Jr. worried that it carried connotations of violence and separatism, while SNCC and CORE embraced it and the NAACP and SCLC kept their distance. Later in 1966 Huey Newton and Bobby Seale borrowed the Lowndes panther for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California. Black Power’s emphasis on pride and self-definition reached well beyond politics, into the demand for Black studies courses, the embrace of African culture, and the Black Arts Movement, and it drew on the legacy of Malcolm X.
See also: Black Arts Movement, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Freedom Summer, Sit-In
Sources
- National Archives, “‘Turn This Town Out’: Stokely Carmichael, Black Power, and the March against Fear,” Rediscovering Black History (2016). Link
- National Archives and Records Administration, “Black Power.” Link
- Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, “Black Power.” Link
- Encyclopedia of Alabama, “Lowndes County Freedom Organization.” Link
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