Black Power, Black Lives Matter, and the Civil Rights Movement: Saying It Loud: 1966 – The Year Black Power Challenged America
Mr. Sherrod (pronounced sheh-ROD) drew together the many strands characterizing the younger generation of civil rights leaders that emerged in the early 1960s, including a militant urgency, a commitment to grass-roots activism and an open espousal of Christian faith as the engine of the movement.
He was one of the first Black people to realize the importance of field work: developing a broad-based coalition of teenagers, college students and churchgoers in order to advance voting rights and desegregation.
He moved to Albany in the late summer of 1961. He had just finished serving a month in a South Carolina prison for his part in a lunch-counter sit-in. The four had refused bail, choosing instead to expose the cruelty of a system that punished Black people for the simple act of trying to buy a sandwich.
In the summer of 1966, America’s top civil rights leaders had descended on Mississippi for what became known as the Meredith March. The group had left Memphis, Tennessee to go to Jackson, Mississippi to take part in a voting rights demonstration started by the man who integrated the university. Meredith had been shot by a White supremacist and hospitalized with severe bullet wounds.
The year of 1966 when the Black Power movement was founded is a time when race relations have changed a lot. When John Lewis was replaced as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he challenged the use of non-violence.
Whitaker examines the pivotal year in his new book, Saying It Loud: 1966 — The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement. Whitaker notes that for years the rallying cry of the civil rights movement had been “Freedom now!” But, he says, on June 16, 1966, Carmichael ushered in a new call to arms — “Black Power!” There was a rally in Mississippi.
A short story about the scene was picked up by over 200 newspapers the next day. Overnight, the Black Power Movement was born.
For today’s Black Lives Matter activists and others, the political lesson of 1966 is to understand that defiant slogans and street protests aren’t enough to bring about lasting change. External unity and cross-racial alliances are also important.
What can I say that hasn’t already been said about a group that looms so large — even today — in the popular imagination? The Black Panthers came into being at the dawn of a national Black consciousness movement and amid the fury of a protest movement that rocked the country. It was a time when people didn’t want authority to be given to them.
The party’s mission and structure were unique. The panthers were a visible part of the community because of their distinctive black leather jackets and berets. When Black people were stopped by the police, Panthers would gather at the scene to make sure there was no abuse. If an act of police abuse occurred, the party would help the victim find legal representation.
The White responded as viciously as they had seen in the South when King tried to bring his peaceful approach to Chicago. In the 1966 midterms elections, a White “backlash vote” helped elect Ronald Reagan to the statehouse in California and propelled a rightward swing that set the stage for Richard Nixon’s law-and-order campaign two years later.
An ultranationalist faction within SNCC pushed to expel all White members, a bid that was initially dismissed by the group’s leaders but eventually prevailed at a staff retreat rife with drug use in the Catskill Mountains. A few months later, a spent Carmichael stepped down as SNCC’s chairman after only one year, giving way to a successor with even more inflammatory rhetoric and far less charm named H. Rap Brown.
The Black Panther was consumed by another vicious cycle. Winning release from prison in late 1966 with the backing of authors who admired the jailhouse essays he would publish in the book “Soul on Ice,” Eldridge Cleaver teamed up with Newton and Seale—then pushed the Panthers to depart from their focus on local police and embrace talk of armed revolution.
A second lesson is to be ready for intense backlash if there is a temporary progress. A student of 1966 would not have been surprised to see how swiftly the momentum for police and other reforms stalled after the last moment of “racial reckoning” in 2020, in the face of a concerted campaign to demonize “wokeness” and calls to “defund the police.”
The language of the civil rights movement changed in 1966. There was also an “awakening of Black consciousness on a cultural level,” he says. The year that Afros took off was when a lot of young Blacks decided that they didn’t want to be called Negroes anymore.
There was also a notable shift away from integration, Whitaker says. He wanted black people to create their own political party and to choose their own officials. He led the group to lose its political clout because he expelled the white members. Ronald Reagan’s victory as governor of California in 1966 and George Wallace’s bid for president in 1968 were all part of the foundation for the modern conservative movement.
“A big lesson of 1966 is, beware of the potential backlash,” Whitaker says. I was in the middle of all the marches that summer when I was writing this book. I see what happened in 1966 and what happened in 1966 tells me that there is going to be hell to pay. There’s going to be a big backlash to what looks like all this progress in 2020. We’re living with that right now.
Newsweek is the first national news magazine to be led by an African American. His previous books include Smoketown, My Long Trip Home and the 2014 biography Cosby, which was later widely criticized for not addressing multiple allegations that superstar comic Bill Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted women. Whitaker has since acknowledged that it was a mistake to omit the allegations from his book, tweeting, “I was wrong to not deal with the sexual assault charges against Cosby and pursue them more aggressively.”
When Dr. Stokely and the Great Migration Meteomorphisms Went Out in the South, and How Dr. King Made Their Way
What Stokely realized, particularly after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, was that just registering Blacks in the South to vote really wasn’t going to get them that far, as difficult as that was. Why? Because those states were completely controlled by segregationist Democrats, the most famous of which we all know was George Wallace, who was the governor of Alabama. We shouldn’t have to register these Black folks to vote because we want to vote for white supremacists. So he started in Alabama, in ’65 and 66, organizing Blacks to form their own political party so that he could organize. They could choose their own officials.
The press portrayed Carmichael as [Martin Luther] King’s nemesis. But in fact, on a personal level, they got along quite well. He had a lot of respect for Dr. King. Dr. King didn’t agree necessarily with all of Stokely’s rhetoric, but he admired the fact that he was an activist who had put his life on the line and going out to organize in the South. There were differences between tactics and strategy and background. Some of the Black Power leaders came from the South, but a lot of them came from the North. So they were the children of the Great Migration. Their parents and grandparents had come north from the South. They had had educational opportunities that Blacks in the South didn’t necessarily have. Before going to Bronx High School of Science in New York, Carmichael had gone to Howard University. And they just didn’t have the sort of tradition of deference, frankly, that the older generation in the South had. The previous generation of civil rights had more of a roots in the church. So they just sort of had a different attitude. They were impatient. They saw their parents’ dreams dashed when they came north.
After Selma, he was famous and he used that fame to go around the country and also overseas to raise money for SNCC. That was a good thing for SNCC’s finances, but he had distanced himself from many of the SNCC members. He got out of touch with the militant mood that took shape in 1966. In the spring, the entire membership would meet at a retreat to discuss strategy, but also be able to choose their officers for next year. Lewis was raising money while he was in Europe. He arrives badly jetlagged to this retreat at a religious camp outside of Nashville, expecting that he’s going to be reelected. But a lot of the rank and file SNCC members at that point were upset with him for being too distant, too preoccupied with all of this travel, but also with still being too close to King, but actually, I think the issue was much more with LBJ. .. The first time, it wasStokely who won. It crushed John Lewis. This had been the identity of him. He was poor when he was a young person. We remember him now as the sainted congressman and beloved national figure. But that experience just completely crushed him. It took him a long time to recover.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/08/1155093955/mark-whitaker-black-panthers-stokely-carmichael-civil-rights-saying-it-loud-1966
On the Women’s Movement in Los Angeles: Kathleen Neal at the time of the 1970s Los Angeles Black Panthers Reionization
In Watts, after the the Watts riots of 1965 in Los Angeles, there had been a group of local Black activists who had decided that they were going to ride around just looking out for situations where police, white police were interacting with the local Black population and just stand at a remove where the police could see them, but where they weren’t trying to interfere, but just to make their presence known. Like, “We’re watching this. So if anything gets out of hand, if the police in any way abuse their authority, we will be witnesses.”
A native of Oakland, Calif., she is a writer and retired real estate agent. The views in this commentary are her own. CNN has more opinion.
That’s one of the reasons why I left the Black Panthers in 1971. Not long after that, the movement died out, after years of being targeted by the federal government, including having been infiltrated by informants. Over time, some Panthers abandoned the party, others ended up in prison, some were killed by police, still others were killed on the streets of some of the same communities they had once fought so hard to help.
I met Kathleen Neal on my first day working for the panthers. She and I instantly became friends after she dropped out of Spelman College.
I don’t think I’d stayed if Kathleen hadn’t been there. She was a college girl like me. In my middle class neighborhood in the hills of Oakland most residents were teachers, lawyers, doctors and such.
There was no official membership process for joining the Panthers. If you started showing up at the office regularly, you were considered a member of the Party. I was asked by Cleaver to come to the office and help out the boys, but he wanted me to do things that were considered women’s work.
For most of us, the early women’s movement was synonymous with upper class, college-educated White women and was seen as irrelevant to the lives of Black women. The role of Black women was to support Black men, period. I edited the newspaper during those early days. Women also went to rallies and sold the BPP weekly newspaper and Panther buttons.
The party never officially declared itself a socialist organization, although its tenets certainly leaned that way. In order for equality to happen, those with the most would have to give up some of their wealth and privileges to those with the least.
It was out of this sense of social justice that the free breakfast program was started at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church. Feeding poor children a nutritious breakfast before school was a political act. The program was such a success that it eventually went national, and eventually came to be duplicated in government-run programs across the country.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/20/opinions/black-panther-party-black-history-month-fleming-ctpr/index.html
How I Met a White Man and What I Learned about Real Estate: From a Real Estate Agent to a Black Panther Party
By this time I also was a single parent and had a child to support. I met and married a man from Britain and moved with him to Aberdeen, Scotland, where for the first time in my life, I encountered poor, underprivileged White people who – like Black people back home in the United States – had been oppressed and discriminated against. It was very revealing. I returned to the United States with my by-then teenage daughter who would need to be put through college.
Eventually, my marriage ended and in my early 40s, I became a real estate agent. Isn’t that the epitome of capitalist greed? Not at all. I decided to work in reaI estate because I wanted to educate people on good buying habits when they purchase a home. I also used my privilege as a realtor to raise thousands of dollars for the local food shelter, women’s shelter and homeless shelter over the years.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/20/opinions/black-panther-party-black-history-month-fleming-ctpr/index.html
The struggle for a more just world: black liberation and racial injustice in the era of the internet and in the higher education system
Black people are still being brutalized and murdered by the police. The higher education system is trying to control how Black students learn about their own history. Books are being banned. The planet is imploding. I am no longer a member of the black liberation movement. But for me, the struggle for a more just world goes on.