Abstract
Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) is one of the most important political leaders of the postwar era yet remains one of the most obscure icons of his generation. A civil rights militant turned Black Power revolutionary, Carmichael’s call for “Black Power” in Greenwood, Mississippi during a late spring heat wave in 1966 sent shockwaves throughout the United States and beyond. Black Power represents one of the most controversial, enduring, and pivotal stories of the twentieth century. Individuals and groups that played major and minor roles in this movement—which range from Malcolm X, William Worthy, Lorraine Hansberry, the Black Panthers, Lyndon Johnson, black Muslims, the FBI, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Huey P. Newton, Kathleen Cleaver, Fidel Castro, and the New Left to name a few—make this period nothing less than a historical epoch that encompasses the tragic and heroic character of the postwar global era. Spanning continents and crossing oceans, Black Power’s reach was global, stretching from urban projects in Harlem to rural hamlets in Lowndes County, Alabama, to poor black neighborhoods in West Oakland and out to the revolutionary cities of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, Conakry, Guinea, Algiers, Algeria, and the cosmopolitan internationalism of London, Stockholm, and Paris.1
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Notes
For a comprehensive examination of the movement see Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).
See also Peniel E. Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006)
Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
Charles Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered] (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998)
Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)
William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: Black Power and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006)
Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, eds., In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspective on a Revolutionary Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)
Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999)
Manning Marable, Black American Politics: From the Washington Marches to Jesse Jackson (London: Verso, 1985)
Mike Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the 1960s (London: Verso, 1999)
Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004)
Kathleen Cleaver, and George Katsiaficas, eds., Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (New York: Routledge, 2001)
and Yohuru Williams, Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven (New York: Brandywine Press, 2000).
Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003).
See the special issues I edited on Peniel E. Joseph, ed., “Black Power Studies,” The Black Scholar 31, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2001) and
Joseph, ed., “Black Power Studies,” The Black Scholar 32, no. 1 (Spring 2002)
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Touchstone, 1988), 483.
Gordon Parks, “Whip of Black Power,” Life, May 19, 1967, 79
For Carmichae;’s relationship with local people in the South see Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)
Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 335
Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006)
See also Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power (New York: Random House, 1967) and
Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks (New York: Random House, 1971).
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995)
Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999)
Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), and Branch, At Canaan’s Edge
Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001)
and David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999).
Stokely Carmichael, “Who Is Qualified?,” The New Republic, January 8, 1966, 22.
Lerone Bennett Jr., “Stokely Carmichael: Architect of Black Power,” July 1966, Ebony. SNCC reprint of Ebony article, 1.
Bernard Weinraub, “The Brilliancy of Black,” Esquire, January 1967, 130, 132–34.
Sol Stern, “The Call Of the Panthers,” New York Times Magazine, August 6, 1967.
Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther Kings Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007)
and Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
Jules Milne, Kwame Nkrumah: The Conakry Years: His Life and Letters (London: Panaf Books, 1990), 261.
Ethel Minor, “Black Activist’s Activities in Africa,” Muhammad Speaks, October 10, 1969, 35, 37–38.
Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Vintage, 1992), 187–99.
Charlie Cobb, “Revolution: From Stokely Carmichael to Kwame Ture,” The Black Scholar, 27, no. 3–4 (Fall 1997), 32–38.
Important works include Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994)
Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)
Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)
Rhonda Y Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggle Against Urban Lnequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Scot Brown, Fighting For Us: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, andBlack Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003)
Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “Strategies for Black Liberation in the Era of Globalization: Retronouveau Civil Rights, Militant Black Conservatism, and Radicalism,” The Black Scholar 29 (Fall 1999), 25–47
Jeanne Theoharis, “Black Freedom Studies: Re-Imagining and Redefining the Fundamentals,” History Compass, 4 (2006), 1–20
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© 2011 Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton
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Joseph, P.E. (2011). Revolution in Babylon. In: Marable, M., Hinton, E.K. (eds) The New Black History. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230338043_11
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