caricatures of organizations, such as the NATIONAL
ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED
PEOPLE, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Urban League,
and their leaders as hustlers in different shades.
In the preface, Schuyler dedicates Black No
More to all of the “pure Caucasians” of the world,
setting up any such readers for a shock. He then
introduces Max Disher, a brown trickster; Bunny
Brown, his sidekick; and the racist environment in
which they live. Max is rejected by a racist white
woman, Helen, who is entertained by black cabaret
performers but is repulsed at the idea of dancing
with a black man. This rejection sends Max to Dr.
Crookman, founder and inventor of Black-No-
More, Inc., where all traces of blackness are re-
moved; here Max becomes Matt, “white” man. The
remainder of the novel traces Matt’s adventures as
a Caucasian: He marries Helen and, with Bunny
(also transformed), infiltrates the major racist or-
ganization of the country, extorting millions of
dollars and finally fleeing to Europe.
In addition to the exploits of Max/Matt, the
reader is also privy to the effects of the runaway
success of Black-No-More, Inc., on American so-
ciety. As the population takes advantage of this so-
lution to the race problem, black race leaders are
put out of the “leadership” business; as America
loses its cheap black labor, an increasingly violent
labor situation erupts; and lying-in hospitals are
created to secretly change the growing number of
mixed-race babies to white. In an attempt to deci-
pher a “proper” race hierarchy, scientists discover
that more than half of the Caucasian population
has “tainted” black blood, including those who
have most advocated racial purity. Just as Amer-
ica goes wild with frenzy, Dr. Crookman brings
order back to society by announcing that that the
“newly” white are actually two to three shades
lighter than “real” Caucasians. Suddenly white is
no longer right, and sales boom for skin-darken-
ing lotions; “normality” returns with the ideology
“black is beautiful.” Schuyler makes clear that there
are definite advantages to possessing white skin
in America, but human nature does not change
purely because of skin color.
Adenike Marie DavidsonBlack Power
In 1966 Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture),
coined the term “Black Power” during a period of
incarceration in Greenwood, Mississippi. James
Meredith had been conducting his Walk Against
Fear from Memphis to Jackson that summer. A
sniper had shot Meredith, the first African-Ameri-
can student to integrate the University of Missis-
sippi, during his solitary march. MARTIN LUTHER
KING’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC), Floyd McKissick’s Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE), and Carmichael’s Student Non-
violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) decided
to continue the march. When they set up camp in
Greenwood, Carmichael was arrested. When he
emerged from custody, he said, “This is the 27th
time I’ve been arrested. We’ve been saying freedom
for six years. What we are going to start saying now
is Black Power.” He began to use the term in a se-
ries of speeches for his organization.
As a terminology, Black Power had been used
before by RICHARD WRIGHT and by the former
U.S. congressman Adam Clayton Powell, but it
was Carmichael’s fiery rhetoric that made it fa-
mous. Carmichael’s idea of Black Power implied
a rejection of and separation from the social and
economic systems into which African Americans
had sought to be integrated. He oversaw the redefi-
nition of what had been seen as a consensual na-
tional value system as a white value system, from
which African Americans, particularly the younger
generation, were alienated.
Carmichael’s Black Power slogan raised the
issue of the right of African Americans to define
their identity on their own terms. Carmichael
believed that asking blacks to appeal to the white
power structure as a vehicle for change was inef-
fective and demeaning. Real change, he argued, re-
quired that blacks develop the necessary economic
and political muscle themselves. Just as the CIVIL
RIGHTS MOVEMENT, under King’s leadership, was
achieving its greatest successes, militant blacks
like Carmichael and MALCOLM X were question-
ing the fundamental premises of nonviolent civil
disobedience. Integration, they concluded, must
no longer be viewed as a positive solution to rac-
ism and segregation, as whites and blacks had fewBlack Power 55