The Black Power Movement

Government legislations, such as the Jim Crow laws, had not provided a fair ground for self-determination. For example, segregation and unequal facilities were ways in which discrimination was legalized. It was not until the mid 1900s that legislations were passed that began to rescind these laws. Even then, full employment, decent housing, and education were not guarantees for black people, which allowed for a perpetual cycle of poverty within the black community. Without employment with a set income and livable housing it was difficult for a black person to move up the economic and social ladder. Consequently, black people were forced into a caste system of social and economic hierarchy that did not provide equal opportunities and favored white people. Furthermore, the Black Panthers believed “in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self” (Newton and Seale 176). EXPAND With proper education of their history and place in society, black people could have a better chance at improving their

Black is Beautiful. Black power movement believed that black folks have run out of patience seeing their people dehumanized as if they are common animals that worth nothing on earth. They believed that it is time for blacks’ to take control of their selves instead of been brainwashed and polluted by white folks. In 1968 Kwame Ture define Black Power as “ the ability of black people to political get together and organize themselves so that they can speak form a position of strength rather a position of weakness”(Lander 1967,p.8). Now looking at this definition, I can say that their philosophy is to liberate black people from white colony and instilling Black people mind that Black is beautiful and gorgeous in every aspect of life. Black power movement did not believe that blacks should totally assimilate into white folks because that means that their history is worth not preserving. This leads me back to what I believed is their philosophy (liberating Blacks form white colony). The Black power movement also accepted Malcolm X philosophy towards violence than Dr King’s view towards violence. They believed that Dr King view of nonviolence tactics is not a viable option for blacks’ libration, in fact integration is as good as surrendering to white supremacy. Their believe is that blacks should be a force of their own and they are ready to take their rights in a violent way if consistently denied the most basic of human rights. In all sense, they are

The Black Power Movement is a social movement because it was seeking to change the societal belief that while blacks and whites were legally equal, blacks were still treated as inferior in

Black power was a movement that had evolved from previous generations, which displayed struggles to acquire change and equality for black people in America. It was a very moving time for America where white people witnessed African Americans coming together and organizing movements against the government. Individuals such as Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Williams, Rosa Parks and many other influential individuals, who paved the way for a new generation to bring forth change to the black community. This was a period where laws and regulations such as Jim Crow, segregation, and voting discrimination became illegal and therefore overturned. This was the opportunity for African Americans to fight back and speak out to bring forth social changes to their communities as

First of all, she suggests that the term black power emerged out of a broader attempt of African American empowerment and consequently characterizes a broad and timeless objective. Different from civil rights activism, which was based on a broad interracial coalition, the politics of black empowerment, while not generally opposed to coalitions with Whites, promoted political and social activism independent from Whites. Black Power paid more attention to the allocation of power and aims to end African Americans dependence on Whites’ changing goodwill. Black Power with big B and big P represents the specific historical period during which African American activists developed and practiced “oppositional ideologies and politics.” Their activism was “unapologetically” Black, informed by ideas of Black consciousness and pride that emphasized self-determination and racial autonomy.

Originating in the North, this movement took on a more radical stance: one that maintained racial separation and aimed to form a separate Black identity and encourage self-reliance and independence from whites (Source I). The Black Power Movement aimed to end institutionalised racism in the Northern states and call for social justice while improving the living conditions of Black people in urban areas who were living in poverty and often subjected to police brutality, although it can be noted that segregation laws were not in place in the North. (Source L). A prominent leader of the Black Power Movement was Malcolm X, who considered the Black Power Movement to be supportive of a nationalist ‘Black’ revolution which mainly focused on the accumulation of land and, as a result, independence as opposed to the ‘Negro’ revolution based on the Civil Rights Movement which focused on integration between races (Source

During the Civil Rights Movement many people were fighting against the oppression of blacks. In today's world, in the U.S., civil rights aren’t as big as it was in the 1950s and 60s. Then blacks were treated differently in a public setting. More specifically there was a great deal or police brutality. The Black Panthers fought against police brutality by walking the streets openly carrying weapons. The Black Panthers were an important group in the Civil Rights Movement.

Their goal was to coordinate the activities of students engaged in civil rights protests. The SNCC achieved tremendous success in desegregating public facilities. This then earned them respect from the country for their determination to act peacefully in the face of violence. By 1966, the organization's newest and most radical leader, Stokely Carmichael, became convinced that the American system could not be turned around without the threat of violent retaliation. Carmichael began preaching “black power” and later left the SNCC to join the Black Panther Party in 1961.

In the United States, these concepts were achieved through Jim Crow laws as well as the implementation of Ghettos. The inherent white supremacy that was present was constant and maintained through the perpetuation of cultural inferiority among African Americans, violence, and economic deprivation. The Black Power movement definitely took on a rather aggressive stance when it came to goals and defining the movement. They believed that without self-determination in the African-American community, the attempt to integrate inevitably became an issue of white supremacy and its effects rather than an issue of equality and rights for the black community. The overarching goal was liberation from racial colonialism however, it seems that the Black Power movement sought to emphasize that without self-determination, the goal to integrate becomes an aimless and insignificant feat. With this in mind, it could be said that the Black Power movement reiterated that the Black Community must be guided by their own determination to succeed rather than necessarily the idea that racial liberation would come to them by waiting and not acting. This was intertwined in one of Stokely Carmichael’s critiques of Martin Luther King Jr’s movement. Although he respected the man greatly, he emphasized that King’s argument was flawed because the United States did not have a true conscious, unlike King noted. As the United States had no conscious, it could be said that integration was not necessarily achieved fully through NVDA. The Black Power movement steered the issue away from whether or not African Americans should be nonviolent but rather projected the idea of whether or not white Americans can acknowledge the hundreds of years of racial violence that occurred towards African-Americans. The main political

Black power is a political slogan that was aimed to promote the ideas of the black racial group. There have been mixed views on weather it weakened the civil rights movement or strengthened it, this involved many factors. Some of the thing’s that weakened the movement was the use violence, organisation and leadership and the CORE ideas and the message of the black power. However some people disagreed that Black Power weakened the movement as other factors like the Impact of the Vietnam War and the failure of Kings campaigns for the reasons like the difference between the north and south.

Contrary to what most of the literature on the Black Power movement suggests, the radicals’ criticism cannot be reduced to a contestation and negation of the legitimacy of prominent civil rights leadership or White society, it also entailed a condemnation of the power structure and the lack of solidarity within the Black community.

In the early 1920s Marcus Garvey captured the interest of many black Americans when he emphasized black nationalism and black separatism (White et. al. 2012). In 1966, former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Stokely Carmichael, echoed Garvey’s philosophy when he coined the term “Black Power” at a rally in Mississippi (Brown 2014). Introduced as an oratorical tool, black power urged race pride and race unity to inspire militancy among black Americans. It was founded on the belief that black survival depended on the exercise of black power to effect economic and political change in black communities. Alongside Malcolm X’s rhetoric of empowerment and the aggressiveness of groups such as the Black Panther Party, Carmichael’s vision of black power was not representative of integration – what he believed spoke to the “problem of blackness” (Carmichael 1966).

Due to the lack of a definitive definition of the term “black power” whites interpreted it as an “expression a new racism” (Rustin 430). In contrast, blacks thought of “black power” as a signal to whites that blacks would not tolerate the treatment that they had received. The Black Power movement created tension in which Rustin believed the movement “diverts the (civil rights) from a meaningful debate over strategy and tactics, it isolates the Negro community, and it encourages the growth of anti-Negro forces” (Rustin 430). Thus, this tension would prohibit the progression of the civil rights movement.

The Black Arts Movement is famously described by Larry Neal, in his essay “The Black Arts Movement” as the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept” (Neal 272). Led, in some ways, by Malcolm X and advocated by the Black Panthers for Self-Defense, the Black Power Movement can be viewed as a distinct break from earlier civil rights movements. Black Power encouraged the improvement of African American communities rather than the fight for integration and acceptance according to white standards. The Black Power Movement cultivated racial dignity and self-reliance, and also revived an interest in cultural heritage and history. Furthermore, the movement recognized that “standards of beauty and self-esteem were integral to power relations” and sought to cultivate confidence within the black community. (Hiltz and Sell). In addition to sharing an ideological basis, The Black Arts Movement and Black Power Movement merged even further, because the BAM allowed for “concrete expression” of many of the “political values inherent in the Black Power concept” (Neal 272).

Why did the Black Power Movement come into existence? The Black Power Movement grew out of black dissatisfaction with the Civil Rights Movement in the second half of the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement was a movement that emerged in 1890 after the system of Jim Crow which included exclusion and degradation of the citizenship rights of African Americans. The main aspects were racial segregation – upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, voter suppression in the southern states, and private acts of violence aimed at African Americans, unimpeded by authorities. The efforts made by organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Students’ Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) and leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. to conquer the ‘separate but equal’ principle were significant as they gained the black people of the USA two acts, the Civil Rights Act by the American Congress in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The episodes of violence that accompanied Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder was but the latest in a string of urban protests since the mid-1960s. Between 1964 and 1968, there were three hundred twenty-nine protests in two hundred fifty-seven cities across the nation. In 1965, a traffic stop set in motion a chain of events that culminated in violence in Watts, an African American neighborhood in Los Angeles. Thousands of businesses were destroyed, and, by