Black Power Movement

The black power movement was a political, social, cultural, and economic movement for black selfdetermination. The movement, which brought forth a generation of black activists committed to the struggle for and practical realities of black agency, began in the United States in the mid-1960s and lasted until the early 1970s. The legacy of this era has still not been fully accounted for, as this movement for black political, social, economic, and cultural power not only transformed American society, but, also infused peoples of African descent all over the globe with the desire to accentuate and positively identify with black pride and black consciousness. This was a time that recalled the black nationalist legacy of Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), as well as elements of the Harlem Renaissance era of the 1920s, which can be deemed the precursor of the black power movement of the 1960s. As Walter Rodney, author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1981), maintained in a speech in Philadelphia in 1969, “Black Power as a slogan is new, but it is really an ideology and a movement of historical depth.”

After the assassination of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965, there was an ideological shift in the black power movement away from the focus on nonviolent integrationist strategies of Martin Luther King and other leaders of the civil rights movement. Malcolm X's emphasis on human rights over civil rights, and his assertions of black self-determination, a need for knowledge of African heritage, pan-African philosophy, and the promotion of an overall positive black consciousness, highly influenced black youth and student activists. By the mid-1960s, the notion of black power had emerged as the rallying call of mainly disenchanted members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Kwame Ture (1941–1998; also known as Stokely Carmichael) was elected to chair SNCC in 1966 after members had become increasingly impatient with the slow pace of the integrationist tactics of their previous leader, John Lewis (who later became a congressman). Ture left the SNCC in 1967 (to be replaced by H. Rap Brown, who was later known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) and soon after joined the Black Panther Party, established by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966, as the group's honorary prime minister.