Читать книгу Freedom Facts and Firsts - Jessie Carney Smith - Страница 55

The Black Power Movement of the mid-1960s was an outgrowth from the modern civil rights movement. However, the failure of legal and political decisions, and the non-violent movement for African American equality and justice in the American South to bring about significant transformation, resulted in a more militant posture against the prevailing white system of belief and the development of a distinctly African American ideology known as Black Power. Although the phrase had been used by African American writers and politicians for years, the expression gained currency in the civil rights vocabulary during the James Meredith March Against Fear in the summer of 1966, when Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Turé), head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), used the expression as a means to galvanize African Americans. Later, Carmichael, in collaboration with Charles Hamilton, provided an explanation of its meaning in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967). The Black Power Movement stressed racial pride, self-determination, economic independence, and social equality through the creation of black political and cultural institutions. Although the civil rights legislation was an effective attempt toward eliminating inequality between African Americans and whites, blacks were still encumbered by lower wages, police brutality, and racial discrimination. Later in 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for self-Defense. By the late 1960s, the Black Power Movement had made a significant impact on American culture and society. Considered by some to be an affirmative and proactive force designed to help African Americans attain full equality with whites, others ostracized it as a radical, at times violent faction whose principal purpose was to further broaden the racial chasm. While the movement essentially disappeared after 1970, the concept of positive racial identity remained embedded in the African American consciousness.

Linda T. Wynn