Black Power Movement

2 Key excerpts on "Black Power Movement"

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  Black Power and the American People

  Culture and Identity in the Twentieth Century

  • Rafael Torrubia(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  In some respects, the growth of black militancy was a logical product of the civil rights movement’s efforts to achieve equality, dignity and freedom. This was not always immediately apparent, as a heavy layer of attitude, style and rhetoric cloaked the most salient similarities. Nevertheless the ultimate concerns of the two movements were consanguineous. There would have been no Black Power without civil rights and the 1960s movement was an incomplete precursor to the 1970s evolution of African-American consciousness.

  However, Black Power sought more than guarantees of legal equality and renewed governmental attention to constitutional rights. Militants wanted control of the defining force of American society – power, both actual and psychological, by ‘any means necessary’.80 In retrospect, these means came to encompass a bewildering array of cultural forms.

  Historians and the wider public still have problems grasping the scope and form of Black Power. Our collective historical memory is inevitably shaped by mass culture, and as Marita Sturken noted, the processes of representation which we choose, or are chosen for us, block out difficult to represent memories, replacing them with simpler ciphers, a commemorative shorthand.81 Our current difficulties in anatomising the complexity of the Black Power Movement lie in its mid-1960s origins. Despite the fact that as James Forman noted ‘by 1966 the problems of black people across the United States had become similar in all their fundamentals’, mainstream coverage suffered from confused and inconsistent framing, amid a quest for definable leaders and symbols amidst polarising rhetoric.82

  During the period, comprehensive enquiries which might have illuminated the movement’s cultural richness and diversity of thought were seldom attempted. Aspirational ideology and street-smart swagger were given roughly equal page space. The press rushed to cover race issues with little self-critique; neither routines nor approaches changed – the same sources were used and the same stories proliferated, using ‘values of conflict, proximity, prominence and the unusual occurrence’.83 Any attempt by contemporary social scientists to delineate the ideological variants of Black Power and locate common denominators would have been of immeasurable value, as would a more informed understanding of the diverse manner in which militants aspired to acquire power. This gap in source material is understandable. At the popular level the strategies and goals of 1960s campaigners were often entangled. Often methodologies were interpreted as goals, and vice versa. The international climate lent itself to fears of spontaneous anarchy. Most importantly, profound cultural differences between white and black America had created a distinct disjunction in interpretations of Black Power. Recognising this disjunction was seldom easy, as media interpreters were enmeshed in a network of ‘unquestioned racism [and] inferential assumptions . . . largely invisible to those who formulate the world in its terms.’84

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  Achieving Blackness

  Race, Black Nationalism, and Afrocentrism in the Twentieth Century

  • Algernon Austin(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  For Campbell, like Powell, the meaning of Black Power was that black people should build their own organizations or take control of the organizations that served them. Both Powell and Campbell make clear that Black Power is not simply a new strategy within the civil rights movement but a rejection of the goals of that movement.

  These ideas were restated at subsequent Black Power conferences. The activists at the 1968 Conference stated, “Black control is Black nationalism; control and chosen by Blacks for the benefit of Blacks. Separation has always been a fact. The difference now is that Blacks want to control and humanize it.”44 In the 1970 Black Power Conference, known as the Congress of African Peoples, the “Four Ends of Black Power” were defined as self-determination, self-sufficiency, self-respect, and self-defense for black Americans.45 This conception of Black Power was only a slight expansion of Maulana Karenga’s 1967 definition of Black Power as self-determination, self-respect, and self-defense.46 The two hundred fifty organizations attending the 1970 Congress of African Peoples formally adopted this understanding of Black Power as part of the Conference.47 This basic conception of Black Power was present from the first Black Power conference in 1966.48

  One potential source of confusion for scholars studying the Black Power Movement was the fact that by 1970 many Black Power activists began defining themselves as Pan-Africanists. The historian Manning Marable, for example, believes Pan-Africanism was a shift away from Black Power.49 Again, if we turn to the Black Power conferences, we can understand what “Pan-Africanism” meant. The 1970 Congress of African Peoples defined Pan-Africanism as “the global expression of Black Nationalism,” in other words, as the global expression of Black Power.50 They argued that the “Four Ends of Black Power [are] not only . . . priorities of Africans on the American continent, or in the Western Hemisphere, but . . . major priorities for Africans all over the world.”51 Pan-Africanists argued, “all Black people are Africans, and that as Africans, [Black people] are bound together Racially, Historically, Culturally, Politically, and Emotionally.”52

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