A slogan before a book
The book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, was published in 1967, but the phrase it made famous was already in public circulation. The slogan is usually dated to June 1966, during the march through Mississippi that followed the shooting of James Meredith.
Meredith, who had integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, set out on a solitary walk along Highway 51 early in June 1966 to encourage Black voter registration. He was shot and wounded on the second day. Leaders of the major civil rights organisations then took up the march. Among them were Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Carmichael, who had recently been elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. As the marchers passed through the state, the group’s relationships were uneasy, with debates over tactics, over the role of white volunteers and over whether to accept the protection of armed guards.
Greenwood, June 1966
In Greenwood, Mississippi, Carmichael was arrested by local police while the marchers were setting up camp, and he was released after some hours. That evening he spoke to a crowd and called for Black Power. Other SNCC organisers, notably Willie Ricks, had already been using the phrase, and the crowd took it up as a chant. Newspapers reported it widely, and within days it was the subject of national argument.
Older figures in the civil rights movement worried that the words would be heard as a threat, or as a rejection of the nonviolent, integrationist message that had won broad support in the early 1960s. King, for his part, was uneasy about the slogan while acknowledging the frustrations behind it. Supporters answered that it meant political and economic self-determination, pride in Black identity and an end to dependence on white goodwill. The phrase was ambiguous enough that each side could, and did, read it in its own way.
What the book argued
Carmichael and Hamilton wrote the book partly to set out what the phrase was supposed to mean. Hamilton was a political scientist, and the text mixes movement experience with academic reasoning. Several themes stand out.
- Racism operates through institutions as well as through individual prejudice. The authors distinguished between acts by individuals and the quieter, systemic harm done when the normal workings of a society leave a community poorer, sicker or less powerful. The term “institutional racism” is closely associated with this book.
- Black communities needed to build their own political and economic strength, including organisation at the local level, rather than rely on outside allies to speak for them.
- The coalition politics of the early 1960s, in which Black activists worked in alliance with white liberals, had limits. The authors argued that coalitions were useful only between parties with real power and compatible interests.
- Integration, as then commonly pursued, risked assuming that Black institutions were inherently inferior.
The book was published by Random House and sold widely, including in paperback. Readers tended to find it more reasoned and less inflammatory than the headlines about the slogan had suggested, though it was still a hard-edged document and many white liberals found it painful reading.
Context in 1967
The book appeared in a tense year. Carmichael stepped down as SNCC chairman in May 1967 and was succeeded by H. Rap Brown. In the summer, rebellions in Newark and Detroit were set against a backdrop of arguments over whether the movement was fragmenting. The Newark riot began in mid-July, and the Detroit uprising followed later that month. Commentators sometimes linked Black Power rhetoric to the violence, though the evidence for any direct link was thin, and the President’s Kerner Commission, created in the wake of the disorders, pointed instead to deeper structural problems such as segregation, poverty and policing.
The same year brought a quite different sign of Black political advancement. In November, Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana, were elected mayors, which many supporters of the Black Power idea saw as an example of what community organising and a Black electorate could achieve through conventional politics.
An uneven legacy
The slogan’s meaning shifted over the following years. Some groups used it in a militant, separatist spirit; others took it to mean electoral organising, cultural pride and Black studies programmes in universities. Carmichael himself became more radical, left the United States for Africa in the late 1960s and later took the name Kwame Ture. Hamilton, by contrast, went on to a long academic career.
Historians still discuss how far the book reflected a clean break with the older civil rights movement and how far it was a continuation of it under pressure. What is clear is that in 1967 it gave a name, and an argument, to a mood that had been building since the Mississippi march of the year before. It also forced readers, whether they agreed or not, to confront the question of what equality would actually require beyond the removal of legal barriers.