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Between 1965 and 1968 the civil rights movement entered a new phase. Alongside the SCLC's Southern campaigns and the NAACP's legal work emerged a set of movements and ideas grouped under the label Black Power. The shift had been building for years. The Nation of Islam had articulated a separatist alternative to integration since the 1930s; Malcolm X had become its most compelling speaker before breaking with it in March 1964; SNCC organisers in Mississippi had grown sceptical of white liberal allies during Freedom Summer; and the riots in Harlem (1964), Watts (1965), Newark (1967) and Detroit (1967) made plain how little the civil rights laws of 1964 and 1965 had changed day-to-day conditions for Black Americans in the urban North.
This lesson covers the emergence of Black Power: its ideological roots in Malcolm X's arguments for self-defence and Black pride, its political expression in Stokely Carmichael's SNCC and the Black Panther Party, its symbolic moments such as the Mexico Olympics salute in 1968, and its ending under sustained pressure from the FBI's COINTELPRO programme. It also examines the urban uprisings of the mid-1960s, which, although not organised by Black Power groups, shaped the political context in which those groups operated. You need to understand both the arguments and the events, and the debates between King's philosophy of non-violence and Malcolm X's position of "by any means necessary".
By the mid-1960s more than 40% of African Americans lived in Northern and Western cities, having migrated from the South during the First and Second World Wars and the decades that followed — the Great Migration. In those cities they encountered a set of conditions that the civil rights laws of 1964 and 1965 barely addressed.
| Problem | How it worked |
|---|---|
| De facto housing segregation | "Restrictive covenants" (until 1948), FHA lending policies ("redlining"), real-estate "steering" and violence confined Black families to specific neighbourhoods |
| Substandard housing | Older, overcrowded apartments; absentee landlords; high rents relative to income |
| De facto school segregation | Because neighbourhoods were segregated, so were neighbourhood schools |
| Unemployment | Black unemployment was consistently twice the white rate; Black youth unemployment reached 25–30% in some cities |
| Union exclusion | Many skilled trade unions either barred Black workers or admitted them only as a small minority |
| Policing | Predominantly white police forces patrolled Black neighbourhoods; stop-and-search and rough handling were routine |
The gap between the optimistic message of the Civil Rights Act and the reality of these conditions was the central political fact of the Black Power years. SCLC's 1966 campaign in Chicago, covered in the previous lesson, ended with King acknowledging that the methods that had worked against Bull Connor in Birmingham did not work against housing discrimination in the North. The question of what should work was where Black Power entered the debate.
The Nation of Islam (NOI) had been founded in Detroit by Wallace D. Fard in 1930 and, after his disappearance, led by Elijah Muhammad. The NOI combined a distinctive theology — Fard was identified as God in human form, Muhammad as his messenger — with a political programme of Black self-reliance, separatism and moral discipline. Members avoided alcohol, drugs and pork; dressed neatly; and built businesses owned and staffed by Black people. The NOI rejected the goal of integration and called for a separate Black nation.
Malcolm Little joined the NOI while serving a prison sentence in Massachusetts; on his release in 1952 he took the surname X, to signify the African name lost in slavery, and became the NOI's most effective minister. By the early 1960s he was leading the organisation's mosque in Harlem and was one of the most recognisable Black voices in the United States.
Malcolm X's arguments sharpened the critique of the mainstream civil rights movement:
| King's argument | Malcolm X's argument (1963) |
|---|---|
| Nonviolent direct action is morally and strategically superior | African Americans have the right to self-defence "by any means necessary" |
| Integration is the goal | Integration means assimilation into a society that has rejected Black people |
| White allies are essential | White allies can play, at most, a supporting role |
| Appeal to the conscience of the nation | Appeal to the pride and dignity of Black people |
Malcolm X's public appearances made him unwelcome to the NOI's leadership, who preferred religious witness to political mobilisation. When he described Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 as "chickens coming home to roost", Elijah Muhammad suspended him from public speaking.
Malcolm X announced his break with the Nation of Islam in March 1964 and founded two new organisations: Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). In April 1964 he made a pilgrimage to Mecca (the Hajj); the experience of worshipping alongside Muslims of every colour led him to revise his earlier view that white people were inherently evil and to reframe his politics around a broader Pan-Africanism. His autobiography, dictated to the journalist Alex Haley and published posthumously in 1965, became one of the most widely read political books of the decade.
On 21 February 1965 Malcolm X was shot as he began to address a meeting at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. He was 39. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of the murder. He left behind a wife, Betty Shabazz, and six daughters. His death turned him into a symbol for a younger generation of Black activists whose trajectory would run through SNCC, the Black Panther Party and the campus politics of the later 1960s.
In June 1966 the Mississippi NAACP leader James Meredith — who in 1962 had been the first Black student at the University of Mississippi — began a solo "March Against Fear" from Memphis to Jackson. On the second day he was shot and wounded by an ambush on Highway 51. Civil rights leaders including King, the new SNCC chair Stokely Carmichael and CORE's Floyd McKissick agreed to complete the march in Meredith's place.
On the night of 16 June 1966, in Greenwood, Mississippi, Carmichael — who had just been released from jail for the 27th time — addressed a rally. "The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin' us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin' now is Black Power!" The crowd took up the chant. King, marching alongside, later wrote that he was sceptical of the slogan but understood the frustration behind it.
"Black Power" meant different things to different people. For Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, whose 1967 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation gave the phrase its most developed statement, it meant the organisation of African Americans into independent political and economic institutions. For some it meant pride in African and African-American history, dress and language. For others it meant armed self-defence. The slogan was never the property of a single organisation, and its flexibility was part of its power.
Under Carmichael (and later H. Rap Brown), SNCC shifted away from the interracial, nonviolent position of its early years. White members were asked to leave the organisation in 1966; its focus turned towards Black political and economic organisation. Its influence on college campuses helped produce the Black student movement that demanded Black Studies programmes in the late 1960s. By 1969, however, SNCC was in decline; FBI harassment, internal disputes and financial problems left it much reduced from its early-1960s peak.
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by two students at Merritt College — Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Their starting point was policing: they had observed that unarmed Black residents in Oakland had no protection against rough handling by the overwhelmingly white Oakland Police Department. The Panthers armed themselves — legally, under California's open-carry laws at the time — and began following police patrols in Oakland's Black neighbourhoods, standing at a legal distance with guns and law books, observing arrests and advising suspects of their rights.
The Panthers' Ten-Point Program set out their demands. In summary form:
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