Black Power

The intense period of African American activism for social justice, commencing with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund's victory in Brown v. Board of Education and continuing until 1975, is often referred to as the civil rights movement. Yet, that period was actually composed of two distinct phases and characterized by two successive movements: the civil rights movement (1954–1965) and the Black Power movement (1965–1975). Mainstream histories of the 1960s freedom struggle tend to valorize the civil rights movement as heroic and inspirational but downplay and even demonize the Black Power movement (BPM) as an explosive expression of rage, reverse racism, and retaliatory violence—the menacing, threatening evil twin of the civil rights movement, which was responsible for its demise. Such assessments are largely the manufactured consensus of corporate media. Radical histories tend to give a more objective and balanced account, although there are some leftist analyses, which are nonetheless marred by the Eurocentric biases—for example, blaming the BPM for a betrayal of the radical Enlightenment tradition of Marxist class solidarity, the destruction of black-white coalitions, the death of the New Left movement, and the onset of divisive identity politics.

From an anti-imperialist perspective, however, many aspects of the BPM were comparable to the national liberation movements in Africa and Asia during the same historical period. However, the movement, which stressed unity without uniformity, was not monolithic but a broad tent encompassing many tendencies: bourgeois and socialist, reformist and revolutionary, pluralist and separatist, culturalist and materialist, spirited and analytical. The common ideological threads running through all of these tendencies that defined Black Power were group solidarity, self-definition, self-determination, and self-defense. Ethnic or racial group solidarity included an emphasis on collective advancement rather than individual achievement and assimilation. Self-definition involved the rejection of imposed definitions; the redefining of group interests, goals, and objectives, as well as the means for advancing those interests and attaining those goals and objectives; and re-identification as Black or Afro-American rather than Negro, and as a people of color who constituted a global majority rather than an American minority. Self-determination ranged widely—from black people taking the lead in their own movement for liberation rather than letting others lead them, to community empowerment via building alternative institutions and taking control of existing ones, to plans for sovereignty and nation-building. Self-determination efforts included initiatives to acquire political power, economic power, and educational and cultural autonomy and to end institutional racism and white domination in these spheres. Self-defense measures ranged from community patrols to spontaneous insurrections as responses to police brutality to more organized forms of armed struggle against white supremacist repression and aggression.