The Black Panthers are too often caricatured as gun-toting militants who engaged in reckless shootouts with police rather than young revolutionaries who resisted state violence through ambitious social programs that offered health clinics, food giveaways, breakfast for school children, and other anti-poverty efforts that positively affected black communities across the nation. There are no holidays for Black Power icons such as Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture). The Black Power Movement, in stark contrast, has been demonized and disparaged as the “evil twin” that destroyed the civil rights movement. Carmichael at the rostrum, said: “To hell with the draft.” Stokely Carmichael, 25, head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, speaks at the University of California’s Greek Theater, Berkeley, California, October 29, 1966, jammed with 14,000 people. National holidays, lavish memorials, new museums, documentaries, and films have exalted this period in American history as a national reckoning that moved us closer to Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a “beloved community.” Veterans of this movement, most notably civil rights activist and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chairman John Lewis, have been rightfully lauded by President Barack Obama, politicians, and pundits as legendary soldiers in the struggle for racial equality that predates America’s founding. 6, 1965, signing of the Voting Rights Act.
Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v. Nowhere is this more evident than in the belated recognition of the Civil Rights Movement’s heroic period, from the May 17, 1954, U.S. The awkward identification of Ali as a “civil rights” activist, instead of Black Power icon, attests to the sanitizing of our recent past. We make peace with history by forgetting its most uncomfortable parts, basking instead in moments of retrospective national unity. The Black Power Movement radicalized domestic civil rights struggles in ways that continue to transcend racial, political, cultural, and generational boundaries.įrom Black Power to Black Lives Matter, the struggle for black political self-determination - that is, the power for black people globally to define their wants, needs, friends, enemies, aspirations, and ambitions for themselves - remains as relevant in our own time as it was then.Īs heavyweight champion boxer Muhammad Ali’s recent death reminds us, selective memory haunts our national soul. Stokely Carmichael’s call for “Black Power!” in Mississippi 50 years ago today indelibly transformed America’s civil rights struggle and national race relations.
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