Hamilton said that as civil unrest began to flare
in Detroit, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey,
Carmichael’s words eventually began to be asso-
ciated with race riots and guns and “burn baby
burn,” a slogan adopted by urban dwellers, who
called on blacks to riot, to burn down their often
less-than-human living spaces in ghettos (spaces
of hopelessness and despair) across America from
California to New York. Images of young people on
television singing “We Shall Overcome” began to
be replaced with pictures of angry young people in
black berets, with raised fists, and men with guns.
In 1966 and 1967 Carmichael lectured at campuses
around the United States and traveled abroad to
several countries, including North Vietnam, China,
and Cuba. He made perhaps his most provoca-
tive statement of all in Havana: “We are preparing
groups of urban guerrillas for our defense in the
cities. It is going to be a fight to the death.”
Although Black Power quickly became associ-
ated in the eyes of the national media with violence,
the term mainly referred to African Americans’
self-reliance, racial pride, and economic and po-
litical empowerment. According to Carmichael,
We are on the move for our liberation. We’re
tired of trying to prove things to white people.
We are tired of trying to explain to white peo-
ple that we’re not going to hurt them. We are
concerned with getting the things we want, the
things we have to have to be able to function.
The question is, Will white people overcome
their racism and allow for that to happen in
this country? If not, we have no choice but to
say very clearly, “Move on over, or we’re going
to move over you.”Many black writers, particularly proponents
of the BLACK AESTHETICS and BLACK ARTS move-
ments, such as AMIRI BARAKA, HAKI MADHUBUTI,
SONIA SANCHEZ, NIKKI GIOVANNI, SARAH WEBSTER
FABIO, and CAROLYN RODGERS, conceptually em-
braced Black Power. LARRY NEAL explained in his
now-classic essay “The Black Arts Movement” that
the movement was the aesthetic sister of the Black
Power movement. As the editor of Negro Digest/
BLACK WORLD, HOYT FULLER promoted Black Pow-
er’s fundamental ideals. DUDLEY RANDALL founded
BROADSIDE PRESS to publish works that promoted
and celebrated the political message, goals, and
objectives of Black Power.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carmichael, Stokeley, and Charles Hamilton. Black
Power: The Politics of Liberation. New York: Vin-
tage, 1967.
Gayle, Addison, Jr., ed. The Black Aesthetics. Garden
City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here:
Chaos or Community. New York: Bantam Books,
1968.
Raymond JaniferBlack World (Negro Digest)
At the height of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT no
other outlet celebrated “blackness”—with a global/
Pan-Africanist emphasis—more vociferously than
did the editors of Black World, a part of the pub-
lishing empire that John H. Johnson (1918–2005),
the grandson of slaves, successfully built in Chi-
cago, Illinois. In fact, Johnson began his pioneer-
ing journalistic and business venture of Negro
Digest, “A Magazine of Negro Comment,” with a
$500 loan, borrowed with his mother’s furniture as
collateral, on November 1, 1942. Founding Negro
Digest, Johnson, a recipient of relief during the
Great Depression, wrote in his autobiography, Suc-
ceeding against the Odds, was his means of achiev-
ing his dream of getting “some of the good things
of this life” (3).
Patterned after the mainstream’s Reader’s Di-
gest, Negro Digest opened, Johnson retrospec-
tively concluded, “a vein of pure black gold” (3)
and became the forerunner to the Johnson Pub-
lishing Company’s commercially successful sig-
nature magazines, Ebony (founded in 1945) and
Jet (founded in 1951). In his introduction to the
inaugural issue, Johnson explained, “Negro Di-
gest is published in response to a demand for a
magazine to summarize and condense the lead-
ing articles and comment on the Negro now cur-
rent in the press of the nation in ever increasingBlack World 57