Images from the heyday of the Black Power movement live on in popular culture, but the view tends to be blurred. Most people probably consider it as a blip on the 400-year chronology of race relations in America. While some Americans romanticize the movement, others remember it as a short-lived, inflammatory and ill-advised crusade that ran against the tide of peaceful efforts to gain and protect civil rights.
Dr. Peniel E. Joseph dips into the warehouse of history to sharpen the picture, making the case that the Black Power movement co-existed with, drew from and contributed to the nonviolent civil rights movement in many ways. He says many people had a foot in both camps.
“Black Power did not suddenly appear in Northern cities after 1965 as an alternative to civil rights activism,” he writes. “Instead, it existed alongside its more celebrated Southern-based counterpart.”
Joseph, a professor of African-American studies at Tufts University uses clear, penetrating words to spin out rich details. To do so, he pulls threads from many resources, including the works of other scholars, media reports and the files the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept on those working hardest for justice in that paranoid era.
He demonstrates that the battle led by more demanding voices in what he calls “the most misunderstood social movement of the postwar era” began much earlier than we tend to think of it and lasted much longer, ultimately becoming the springboard for political gains that led to the White House.
Joseph’s work focuses on the roles of Stokely Carmichael, who first projected the phrase “Black Power” into the lexicon, and Malcolm X, who personified the ideas encapsulated in it.
Carmichael, then the new chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, became the face of the Black Power movement when he used the term after his arrest for his role in demonstrations in Mississippi in June 1966. He led an effort, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to continue the march James Meredith was attempting when he was shot a few days earlier.
