Black power
[12] On May 1, 1965, a few months after the February 21 assassination of Malcolm X, Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs created "in our basement"[13] the national Organization for Black Power, along "with former and then current members of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and SNCC among its members,"[14] including "representatives from Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, and New York,"[15] as "a coordinating group of grassroots activists that looked to establish a concrete program for black self-determination centered in the cities.
"[12] The first popular use of the term "black power" as a political and racial slogan was by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Willie Ricks (later known as Mukasa Dada), both organizers and spokespersons for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
On June 16, 1966, in a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi, after the shooting of James Meredith during the March Against Fear, Stokely Carmichael said:[18][19] This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain't going to jail no more!
"[22] However, many groups and individuals—including Rosa Parks,[23] Robert F. Williams, Maya Angelou, Gloria Richardson, and Fay Bellamy Powell—participated in both civil rights and black power activism.
In 1970, this contention fulfilled aims similar to those of the languishing Poor People's Campaign, as well as Jesse Jackson's Resurrection City and his later Rainbow/PUSH, the latter a counter to Hamptonian iterations of Rainbow Coalitions.
After seeing the increasing militancy of blacks in the wake of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, and wearying of Elijah Muhammad's domination of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm left that organization and engaged with the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement.
[35] By 1966, most of SNCC's field staff, among them Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), were becoming critical of the nonviolent approach to confronting racism and inequality—articulated and promoted by Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and other moderates—and they rejected desegregation as a primary objective.
They rejected the notion of appealing to the public's conscience and religious creeds and took the tack articulated by another black activist more than a century before, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who wrote: Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
For instance, prominent nonviolent activist Fred Shuttlesworth of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (and a leader of the 1963 Birmingham campaign), had worked closely with an armed defense group that was led by Colonel Stone Johnson.
A concluding note to the convention, addressing its supposed idealism, read: "At every critical moment of our struggle in America we have had to press relentlessly against the limits of the 'realistic' to create new realities for the life of our people.
"[52] Due to the negative and militant reputation of such auxiliaries as that of the Black Panther Party, many people felt that this movement of "insurrection" would soon serve to cause discord and disharmony through the entire U.S.
Julian Mayfield, who became a prominent member in Ghana as well as influencing African American civil rights, stated that the nonviolent, passive-resistive strategies failed the needs of the lower class blacks.
[63] The On March 2, 1970, roughly one hundred people protested outside the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, London, in support of the U.S. Black Panther founder Bobby Seale, who was on trial for murder in New Haven, Connecticut.
The Jamaica Labour Party government of Hugh Shearer banned black power literature such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Eldridge Cleaver and Trinidad-born Stokely Carmichael, later Kwame Ture.
[citation needed] Guyanese academic Walter Rodney was appointed as a lecturer at the University of the West Indies in January 1968, and became one of the main exponents of black power in Jamaica.
The National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) was formed out of the Guild of Undergraduates at the St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), and under its leader Geddes Granger (later Makandal Daaga), along with Khafra Khambon, they challenged Prime Minister Eric Williams and his government.
[66] The Prime Minister tried to appease protesters by introducing a five percent levy to fund unemployment relief, and established the first locally owned commercial bank, but this had little impact.
Black power utilized all available forms of folk, literary, and dramatic expression based in a common ancestral past to promote a message of self-actualization and cultural self-definition.
[74] A central expression of the "soulfulness" of the black power generation was a cultivation of aloofness and detachment, the creation of an "aura or emotional invulnerability," a persona that challenged their position of relative powerlessness in greater society.
[76] Kwami Coleman explains this played an integral role in the production of avant-garde jazz in the 1960s as a response to the use of bebop as cultural propaganda during Cold War and its growing reputation as "white music."
Though the same social messages may no longer consciously influence individual hair or clothing styles in today's society, the black power movement was influential in diversifying standards of beauty and aesthetic choices.
The flavor and solid nourishment of the food was credited with sustaining African Americans through centuries of oppression in America and became an important aid in nurturing contemporary racial pride.
No longer racially specific, traditional "soul foods" such as yams, collard greens, and deep-fried chicken continue to hold a place in contemporary culinary life.
Other well-known writers who were involved with this movement included Nikki Giovanni; Don L. Lee, later known as Haki Madhubuti; Sonia Sanchez; Maya Angelou; Dudley Randall; Sterling Plumpp; Larry Neal; Ted Joans; Ahmos Zu-Bolton; and Etheridge Knight.
Although not strictly involved with the Movement, other notable African-American writers such as novelists Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison and poet Gwendolyn Brooks can be considered to share some of its artistic and thematic concerns.
BAM sought "to link, in a highly conscious manner, art and politics in order to assist in the liberation of black people", and produced an increase in the quantity and visibility of African-American artistic production.
Literature, drama, and music of black people "served as an oppositional and defensive mechanism through which creative artists could confirm their identity while articulating their own unique impressions of social reality.
In the tradition of cultural nationalists, these artists taught that in order to alter social conditions, black people first had to change the way they viewed themselves; they had to break free of white norms and strive to be more natural, a common theme of African-American art and music.
The AACM created a power structure for African-American musicians, especially women who typically faced large amounts of discrimination in the industry, that allowed for the fostering of a healthy jazz community outside of the predatory record companies.
He particularly criticized the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and SNCC for their turn toward black power, arguing that these two organizations once "awakened the country, but now they emerge isolated and demoralized, shouting a slogan that may afford a momentary satisfaction but that is calculated to destroy them and their movement.
