Black Power

Black Power is a term generally used to describe the struggle for civil rights for black people that took place between 1965 and the early 1970s. This period saw rising militancy, greater attention to politics, and a deeper commitment to the internal economic development of black communities under the overall umbrella of civil rights struggle. Black Power also refers to ideas, institutions, and cultural expressions that emphasize political and economic power for African American communities within the United States. In the urban context, Black Power was the central organizing concept for a range of movements in major American cities in the 1960s and 1970s that sought to bring historically marginalized black communities into full power sharing within the political and economic institutions that dominate bigcity life. Black Power advocates took up a range of activities: running for mayor, school board, and city council; encouraging small businesses, homeownership, and entrepreneurial endeavors; advocating for black history in the schools and black studies programs in the universities; seeking redress for police brutality; fighting poverty; and in some cases advocating for a revolutionary remaking of the nation's political and economic system.

Black Power as a phrase entered the American lexicon in 1966, when Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) used the term during a rally in Mississippi. Carmichael deployed the phrase to emphasize that the legislative and legal victories of the Civil Rights Movement would be rendered meaningless as long as black people had no real power in the United States. Black Power thus became the signifier of a shift in the tone and tactics of the long postwar black liberation movement: from an emphasis on legislation and moral suasion to an emphasis on building African American political and economic capacity and on full resistance to white violence, intimidation, and repression. In major cities, black Americans had long held these latter goals, but Black Power nonetheless proved a potent and generative concept around which a diverse array of movements and individuals mobilized. Black Power stands as one of the most important urban reform movements of the 20th century, on a par with those of the Progressive and New Deal eras.

Black Power was (and remains) an extraordinarily broad term. In the 1960s and 1970s, it meant everything from revolution to electing school board members to wearing a dashiki and celebrating the cultural power of African traditions. Its flexibility was part of its attractiveness. Within its broad outlines, however, three distinct tendencies could be observed. First, Black Power advocates in American cities sought to develop and expand the electoral power of African American communities. By the early 1970s, many large cities had black majorities, including Detroit, Newark, and Atlanta. Other cities, like New Orleans, Baltimore, Oakland, and Camden, had black nearmajorities. In still others, including the largest cities in the nation (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles), black communities formed a critical bloc of between one quarter and one third of the voting population. Postwar white outmigration and African American inmigration had transformed urban demographics in the space of a generation, an epochal remaking of the nation's urban populations. In this historic context, Black Power acquired concrete meaning: Black communities could determine who controlled city government.

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