Black Power: “A Nation Within a Nation?”

Abstract

It is often asserted that Black Power resulted from spontaneous combustion in 1965–1966, when the fierce nationalist rhetoric of Malcolm X and anger over the disrespectful treatment of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats led to separatism and a repudiation of interracial solidarity by frustrated civil rights activists. There’s certainly truth in this popular account. SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael did make the slogan “Black Power” instantaneously famous by showcasing it during a June 1966 march in Mississippi because he and others believed “the Movement” had run out of steam. But focusing on the rage of young black people, the desire to separate from whites, and a few charismatic orators like Malcolm X and Carmichael ignores Black Power’s deep roots, how it surged through African American communities, and the complexities of its competing strategies. Instead of a sudden eruption, Black Power grew slowly from ideas, organizations, personal networks, experiences, and tactics that were always under the radar of the national media, in cities and on campuses from New York to Los Angeles (with stops in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and the Bay Area). It flared up like a brushfire after the southern Civil Rights movement reached its climax in 1963–1965, but the ideologies and institutions of Black Power had slowly accumulated over the preceding twenty years since World War II (see chapter 4).

National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

Population experts predict that by 1970 Afro-Americans will constitute a majority in fifty of the nation’s largest cities. In Washington, D.C., and Newark, N.J., AfroAmericans are already a majority. In Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and St. Louis they are one-third or more of the population. … There are more Afro-Americans in New York City than in the entire state of Mississippi. … In accordance with the general philosophy of majority rule and the specific American tradition of ethnic groupings (Irish, Polish, Italian) migrating en masse to the big cities and then taking over the leadership of municipal government, black Americans are next in line. Each previous ethnic grouping achieved first-class citizenship chiefly because its leaders became the cities’ leaders, but racism is so deeply imbedded in the American psyche from top to bottom, and from Right to Left, that it cannot even entertain the idea of black political power in the cities.

—James and Grace Lee Boggs, “The City is the Black Man’s Land,” 1966

In attempting to analyze where the movement is going, certain questions have arisen as to the future roles played by white personnel. … The answers to these questions lead us to believe that the form of white participation, as practiced in the past, is now obsolete. Some of the problems are as follows: The inability of whites to relate to the cultural aspects of Black society; attitudes that whites, consciously or unconsciously, bring to Black communities (western superiority) and about Black people (paternalism); inability to shatter white-sponsored community myths of Black inferiority and self-negation; inability to combat the views of the Black community that white organizers, being “white,” control Black organizers as puppets; insensitivity of both Black and white workers towards the hostility of the Black community on the issue of interracial “relationships” (sex); the unwillingness of whites to deal with the roots of racism which lie within the white community; whites though individually “liberal” are symbols of oppression to the Black community—due to the collective power that whites have over Black lives.

—Atlanta Project, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “A Position Paper on Race,” 1966