The Origins of
Black Power

(19 May 1970)

Legacies of Malcolm X
• Developed framework of human rights as opposed to more narrowly defined
civil rights.
• Emphasized Pan-Africanism and anticolonial/anti-imperialist solidarity, fueled
by his own travels to Africa.
• Recognized socialism’s potential to liberate oppressed peoples.
• Toward the end of his life, began to consider the possibilities of working with
white people to combat racism, while still emphasizing the importance of
Black political separation. (He ultimately rejected Muhammad’s teaching that
all white people are evil, a result of his experiences in performing the Hajj.)
• Advocated changing terminology of Black identity from “Negro” (a term
widely used by leaders like Dr. King) to “Black” and, ultimately, “Afro-
American.”
• Inspired new wave of activists who rejected the logic of tactical nonviolence
and the desirability of integration.

Lowndes County Freedom
Organization (LCFO)

In March 1965, protesters carried out the famous march from Selma to the state capital of
Montgomery to demand protection for voting rights and to call attention to the violence
routinely utilized to disfranchise blacks Alabamians in places like Selma. The majority of the
march was through Lowndes County, so notorious as the site of racial violence that it was
known as “Bloody Lowndes.”

Stokely Carmichael and the LCFO
One of the original Freedom Riders, Carmichael worked in
1962 and 1963 canvassing voters in Greenwood, Mississippi,
and participated in the Mississippi Challenge in 1964, an
experience that convinced him that Black political power was
the key to Black liberation. During the summer of 1965, he
worked on a voter registration campaign in notoriously violent
Lowndes County, Alabama, situated between Selma and
Montgomery. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization
(LCFO) was formed as part of SNCC’s joint efforts with local
organizers, representing a third-party alternative to the
Alabama Democratic party, headed by George Wallace.
When SNCC arrived in Lowndes County in 1965, there was
one registered Black voter, LCFO co-founder John Hulett,
though the county’s population was 80 percent Black. The
following year, as a result of LCFO efforts, the majority of the
county’s registered voters were Black. In 1970, this shift
resulted in the election of Hulett as sheriff.
Source: SNCC Digital Gateway
Above, Carmichael canvasses in Alabama, 1965.

(1966)
LCFO and the Black Panther
Though most closely associated with the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense, established in
1966 in Oakland, California, the image of a
black panther as a symbol of Black political
power was first used by the LCFO during
1965, illustrating the southern, rural roots of
Black Power, a phenomenon more commonly
associated with northern cities. Due to high
rates of illiteracy statewide, Alabama required
that all political parties be represented by a
visual symbol. John Hulett, a founder of the
LCFO, explained, “The black panther is a
vicious animal….He never bothers anything,
but when you start pushing him, he moves
backward, backward, and backward, and then
he comes out and destroys everything that’s in
front of him.”

Source: LCFO, “Us Colored
People,” Comic book (c. 1966).

A year after passage of the Voting Rights Act, James Meredith, whose efforts to become the first
Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi were met with rioting by white students in
1962, undertook a one-man march through Mississippi, a demonstration against the “all-pervasive
overriding fear” he believed still prevented Black Mississippians from registering to vote. He was
shot by a white sniper on the second day of the planned 220-mile march from Memphis to Jackson
down Highway 51. Above, Meredith lay wounded on the road (6 Jun 1966).
James Meredith’s March Against Fear

A cross-section of civil rights organizations, including
the SCLC, CORE, and SNCC, responded to Meredith’s
shooting, vowing to continue the march in his place.
Once SNCC organizers joined, they decided to detour
through the Delta region in the northwestern part of the
state, as they had deep ties there after several years of
organizing. They hoped to use the march as a means to
register more Black voters and empower those who were
registered but whose fear of white violence continued to
prevent them from casting ballots.

When the marchers reached Greenwood, the center of SNCC’s organizing efforts during
campaigns like Freedom Summer, newly-elected SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael
made a powerful, carefully planned speech calling for “Black Power,” a moment that
dominated news coverage of the march (16 Jun 1966). Conveniently for SNCC, King
was out of town at a press event that evening.
“What do we want?”
Black power!”

“This is the twenty-seventh time I have been
arrested and I ain’t going to jail no more.
The only way we gonna stop them white men
from whuppin’ us is to take over.
What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!”
--Stokely Carmichael
(16 Jun 1966)

Always committed to the philosophy of nonviolence,
King lamented the shift by his friend Stokely
Carmichael and SNCC more broadly away from
tactical nonviolence. King nonetheless acknowledged
that if “Carmichael now says that nonviolence is
irrelevant, it is because he, as a dedicated veteran of
many battles, has seen with his own eyes the most
brutal white violence against Negroes and white civil
rights workers, and he has seen it go unpunished.”
Despite his shifting views, Carmichael acknowledged
the crucial role of nonviolent activism in bringing
young people into the movement: “It gave our
generation–particularly in the South–the means by
which to confront…entrenched and violent racism. It
offered a way for a large number of [Black Americans]
to join the struggle. Nothing passive in that.”
King, Carmichael, and a Generational Shift

South meets West: Carmichael promoted Black Power at a
University of Carolina Berkeley SDS conference (29 Oct 1966).

On Civil Rights Legislation
“I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for
white people, not for black people. For example, I am black. I know
that. I also know that while I am black I am a human being. Therefore I
have the right to go into any public place. White people didn’t know
that. Every time I tried to go into a place they stopped me. So some boys
had to write a bill to tell that white man, ‘He’s a human being; don’t
stop him.’ That bill was for that white man, not for me. I knew it all the
time. I knew it all the time.”

On Imperialism and Poverty
“And that has been the rationalization for Western civilization as it moves
across the world, and stealing and plundering, and raping everybody in its
path. Their one rationalization is that the rest of the world is uncivilized and
they are in fact civilized. And they are uncivilized.
And that runs on today, you see, because what we have today is that we have
what we call modern-day Peace Corps . . . uh . . . missionaries. And they
come into our ghettos and they Head Start, Upward Lift, Bootstrap, and
Upward Bound us into white society. ‘Cause they don’t want to face the real
problem. Which is a man is poor for one reason and one reason only: because
he does not have money. Period. If you want to get rid of poverty you give
people money. Period. And you ought not tell me about people who don’t
work, and you can’t give people money without working, because if that were
true, you’d have to start stopping Rockefeller, Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon
Baines Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, the whole of Standard Oil, the Gulf Club
[Gulf Corporation] - all of them. [applause] Including probably a large
number of the board of trustees of this university.”

On White Opposition to Black Power
“Now we are engaged in a psychological struggle in this country. And
that is whether or not black people have the right to use the words they
want to use without white people giving their sanction to it. And that we
maintain whether they like it or not we gonna use the word ‘Black
Power’ and let them address themselves to that. But that we are not
going to wait for white people to sanction Black Power. We’re tired of
waiting; every time black people move in this country, they’re forced to
defend their position before they move. It’s time that the people who are
supposed to be defending their position do that, that’s white people.
They ought to start defending themselves as to why they have oppressed
and exploited us.”

On Integration
“And in order to get out of that oppression one must wield the group
power that one has, not the individual power which this country then
sets the criteria under which a man may come into it. That is what is
called in this country as integration. ‘You do what I tell you to do and
then we’ll let you sit at the table with us.’And that we are saying that
we have to be opposed to that. We must now set a criteria and that if
there’s going to be any integration it’s going to be a two-way thing. If
you believe in integration, you can come live in Watts, you can send
your children to the ghetto schools. Let’s talk about that. If you believe
in integration then we’re going to start adopting us some white people to
live in our neighborhood.”

On the Place of White Allies
“The question then is, how can white people move to start making the
major institutions that they have in this country function the way it is
supposed to function? That is the real question. And can white people
move inside their own community and start tearing down racism where
in fact it does exist? Where it exists. It is you who live in Cicero and
stopped us from living there. It is white people who stopped us from
moving into Grenada. It is white people who make sure that we live in
the ghettos of this country. It is white institutions that do that. They must
change. In order…for America to really live on a basic principle of
human relationships a new society must be born. Racism must die. And
the economic exploitation of this country of non-white peoples around
the world must also die. Must also die.”

On “Anti-Racist Racism”
“Now we maintain that we cannot have white people working in the black
community - and we’ve made it on a psychological ground. The fact is that all
black people often question whether or not they are equal to whites, because
every time they start to do something, white people are around showing them
how to do it. If we are going to eliminate that for the generation that comes
after us, then black people must be seen in positions of power, doing and
articulating for themselves. For themselves. That is not to say that one is a
reverse racist. It is to say that one is moving on a healthy ground. It is to say
what the philosopher Sartre says, one is becoming an ‘anti-racist racist.’And
this country can’t understand that. Maybe it’s because it’s all caught up in
racism. But I think what you have in SNCC is an anti-racist racism. We are
against racists. Now if everybody who’s white see themselves as racist and
then see us against him, they’re speaking from they’re [sic] own guilt
position, not ours. Not ours.”

On the Democratic Party and the MFDP
“Any time Lyndon Baines Johnson can head a party which has in it
Bobby Kennedy, Wayne Morse, Eastland, Wallace, and all those other
supposed-to-be-liberal cats, there’s something wrong with that party.
They’re moving politically, not morally. And that if that party refuses to
seat black people from Mississippi and goes ahead and seats racists like
Eastland and his clique, it’s clear to me that they’re moving politically,
and that one cannot begin to talk morality to people like that. We must
begin to think politically and see if we can have the power to impose
and keep the moral values that we hold high. We must question the
values of this society, and I maintain that black people are the best
people to do that because we have been excluded from that society. And
the question is we ought to think whether or not we want to become a
part of that society.”

Black Panther Party
for Self-Defense
est. in Oakland, CA
(15 Oct 1966)
Newton and Seale arrived in Oakland as
children during the Second Great
Migration. Newton’s family came from
Louisiana, while Seale’s family was from
Texas. Both grew up in poverty. They
met while taking classes at Merritt
Community College.
Co-founders Bobby Seale and Huey Newton

A desire to escape the inferior segregated schools of the South
drove the aspirations of many Southern migrants, particularly
those who were attracted to California and its strong public
education system.
However, in Revolutionary Suicide, Newton recalled, “During
those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one
teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or
experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn
more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature,
science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense
of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly
killed my urge to inquire.” Experiences like this gave rise to a
movement to form Black Studies programs in American college
and universities, the first of which was established at San
Francisco State College in 1968. To promote vibrant, politically-
relevant education in the communities they served, the BPP
established “liberation schools” like the Oakland Community
School and the Intercommunal Youth Institute in the early 1970s.
Having graduated high school in 1959 though barely literate,
Newton became his own teacher. He ultimately attended law
school and earned a doctorate in social philosophy in 1980. His
dissertation documented government repression of the BPP.
Black Panther children in a classroom
at the Intercommunal Youth Institute,
the Black Panther school, in Oakland
in 1971.

• What demands did the Black
Panther Party make?
• Which of these seem the
most radical? Which seem
the most realistic?
• Did Newton and Seale really
think these goals were
feasible? If not, what
rhetorical points might they
have been working to make?

Huey P. Newton, BPP Minister of Defense (1968)
The Panthers’ early tactic of “policing the police”
generated an image of militancy, which was heightened
by the Party’s uniform: a blue shirt, black pants, a black
leather jacket, and a black beret. Even after switching
from police patrols to “survival programs” as their
primary tactic in 1969, the Panthers were still
characterized by the media primarily as armed militants
patrolling the streets.

(May 1967)

At the state capital in Sacramento, armed Panthers protested the proposed Mulford
Act, aimed at neutralizing the tactic of “policing the police” with loaded weapons
(May 1967).

In Oct 1967, Newton was involved in a shootout with police in which Officer John Frey was
killed. Newton was charged with murder. After two appeals, the charges were overturned in 1970.
While Newton was in jail awaiting trial, the “Free Huey” movement emerged as a multi-racial
political movement joined by other radicals in the San Francisco Bay area of California
demanding Newton’s release. Among other charges, Newton’s allies alleged that it was
impossible for him to receive a fair trial. These efforts made international headlines, significantly
raising the profile of the Party.
“Free Huey”
Movement