Black Power

In June 1966, Stokely Carmichael mounted a flatbed truck in Greenwood, Mississippi, and addressed a crowd of exhausted marchers who had just been tear-gassed and arrested. He had been bailed out of jail for the 27th time. "What we gonna start saying now," Carmichael told the crowd, "is Black Power." The crowd roared the phrase back, and American politics shifted. Two words crystallized a frustration with a decade of marching that had won legal victories without ending economic marginalization or police violence.

Black Power was never a single organization or unified ideology. It encompassed the Black Panther Party's armed self-defense and community programs, the cultural nationalism of Amiri Baraka, the electoral organizing of the National Black Political Assembly, and the Afrocentric scholarship emerging from universities. What unified the movement was a rejection of integration as the ultimate goal and a demand for Black institutions, Black economic control, and Black pride — articulated most powerfully in James Brown's 1968 anthem "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud."

J. Edgar Hoover's FBI treated the Black Panther Party as the greatest domestic threat in America and ran COINTELPRO operations that included infiltration, forged correspondence, and the extrajudicial killing of Fred Hampton in Chicago in December 1969. The movement's critics argued it alienated white allies and handed conservatives ammunition. Its defenders responded that respectability had never fully opened the door, and that Black Power simply named what integration had refused to deliver.