Black Power

Randy Johnson

WGST 591

Reaction Paper: Black Power

"Black power" was not a term Kwame Ture, Stokely Carmichael, coined. He did however make it popular in 1966 while giving his speech on a college campus in California. It is a very powerful term that was easy to unify behind in those oppressive years of the sixties. The term itself was empowering and uplifting for the black community. Once the black community was awakened, the white community started paying more attention also.

SNCC wanted black people to have their own independent political parties; this is what black power meant to them. Whites, for and against the cause, were frightened by this desire for racially united parties. As you stated this was no new idea, but in fact an old one that started to materialize. SNCC realized this could only work in areas were the black population was large enough to win an election. SNCC started to be looked at somewhat militantly when Ture came to be the head of the organization, since he was associated with the Black Panthers. This is, in my eyes, ridiculous; SNCC is founded on non-violence. Why would anyone believe that they would suddenly become a militant activist group once they got a new leader? Well frankly because the term militant is as subjective as art. I view militant as guerilla warfare or some type of military engagement, but others think protest are militant. It's all in the eye of the beholder. I would argue that Ture agrees with me, and Frantz Fanon, on the matter of militancy.

Ture raises the point that black people, as well as white people fighting for the cause, need to learn how to move in their respective communities to clear the obstacles, institutions, set up to continually oppress the poor minorities. Some would say that whites and blacks fought side-by-side for integration, but they're wrong according to Ture. He says that we were fighting against white supremacy. I agree, we were fighting in the war against white supremacy but a step towards that was winning the battle of integration. A lot of people fought hard and some even loss their lives for America to become integrated, so for Ture to imply that this wasn't a big deal isn't right. In his credit though, Ture didn't make a great argument that white people can't give blacks freedom. I believe this was his rational for not being very excited about integration. His philosophy was that all people are born free, but after blacks are born in America the whites enslave us.

Ture was leading SNCC in the same direction but in a new way. SNCC was implementing new tactics to secure black power. These included identifying with poor blacks, no longer depending on the federal government, and political organization. SNCC realized the people it had to reach out to weren't the few middle class blacks or the "talented tenth" or the uncle toms but to the majority of blacks, poor and disheartened. While identifying with the poor, they didn't consider forming any coalitions with groups that weren't out to benefit the "lower" class citizens. I found the second point, gaining independence from the federal government, interesting because this directly conflicts with one of Booker T. Washington's opinions. Mr. Washington believed people should follow the federal government because the feds had their best interest at heart. This is a very naпve notion that Mr. Washington carried; I can see this with 20/20 hindsight. I have read documents in which the government "proved" blacks were inferior to whites, and many other wrong generalities in accordance with race. In respect to the idea of an independent political party I say it was a good thought, but it just can't work on a federal level simply because blacks are a minority. In local elections, such as, city council and