interests in common and whites were unable to
speak for blacks.
King recalled that shortly after Carmichael’s re-
lease from jail in Greenwood he mounted a plat-
form and declared, “What we need is Black Power,”
and Willie Ricks, his SNCC colleague, shouted to
the crowd, “What do we want?” The crowd roared
back, “Black Power.” King said, “This call and re-
sponse continued over and over again for some
time as [Carmichael] strutted around the podium
thrusting his fist into the air” (34). His follow-
ers embraced the idea that power was the “only
thing respected in the world” (35). Carmichael
told them to “Begin building independent politi-
cal, economic, and cultural institutions that they
control and use as instruments of social change
in the US.”
Carmichael’s followers embraced the ideology
of Black Power and saw it as a call for African
Americans to unite, to recognize their shared
heritage, and to build a sense of community.
Carmichael began to convince them that “Be-
fore a group can enter society, it must first close
ranks. By this we mean that group solidarity is
necessary before a group can operate effectively
from a bargaining position of strength in a plu-
ralistic society” (44). From the Greenwood rally
on, definitions of the precise meaning of Black
Power varied within the movement. It came to
encompass the black nationalistic and revolu-
tionary organizations and ideologies of the late
1960s and 1970s and marked a break from the
Civil Rights movement in rhetoric and organiz-
ing style.
Black Power also represented a rejection of the
conciliatory leadership style of King, Roy Wilkins,
and Whitney Young. More important, Black Power
became a rallying cry for young urban black males,
who felt increasingly isolated from King and his
mass movement, particularly his nonviolence and
nonconfrontational leadership style. They believed
that King’s Civil Rights movement’s main thrust
of eliminating racial segregation and winning the
right to vote in the South had largely ignored the
economic problems of vast numbers of African
Americans in the urban ghettoes of the rest of the
United States.
Although consensus on the meaning of Black
Power was never reached within the movement,
its articulation in 1966 by Carmichael and others
marked a shift in the U.S. black freedom strug-
gle. It quickly became associated with the more
militant and radical groups of the Black Social
Protest Movement that emerged after the assas-
sinations of Malcolm X and King. These more
militant and radical groups viewed the traditional
Civil Rights movement as too pacifist and slow to
anger. National conferences on Black Power began
to be held in various cities throughout the United
States; delegates adopted a number of resolutions
including, among other things, a boycott of the
military by African-American men, self-defense
training for African-American youth, and the
division of the country into separate black and
white nations.
As a political idea, Black Power derived from a
long tradition of BLACK NATIONALISM dating back
to late 19th- and early 20th-century leaders, such
as Henry McNeil Turner and MARCUS GARVEY.
Black Power generally meant the empowerment
of African Americans and, in some cases, outright
separatism. Classical Black Nationalistic theory ar-
gues that blacks must unite, gain power, and liber-
ate themselves, not ask for freedom to be granted
to them from racist whites. Most of these black
militants and radicals of the late 1960s considered
themselves followers of the philosophical ideals of
Malcolm X, who argued eloquently that African
Americans should strive for self-determination
rather than integration and that they had the right
to defend themselves “by any means necessary”
against violent attacks from racist whites.
In Black Power (1967), which Carmichael wrote
with Charles Hamilton, professor of political sci-
ence at Columbia University, the author, explained
that Black Power was “A call for black people in this
country to unite, recognize their common heri-
tage, and build a sense of community. It is a call for
black people to define their own goals, to lead their
own organizations” (44). On his own, Carmichael’s
call became increasingly more provocative. He said
that “When you talk about Black Power, you talk
about building a movement that will smash every-
thing Western civilization has created.”56 Black Power