Black Power Protest

The Black Power Protest Movement: Social Change in Action

National Louis University

Josef Ben Levi

Fall, 2012

Course: DEE 603

Activism, Education and Disability

Terry Jo Smith, Ph.D.

November 12, 2012

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Black Power Protest

Introduction

The Black Power Protest Movement, a movement in which I was

personally involved as a young activists for social change, did

not start with a group of Black Baby-Boomers interested in

overthrowing the established order of the United States in the

1960s and 1970s. It did not begin with the Civil Rights movement

under the commendable direction of Black Southern ministers

seeking to lobby for desegregated schools, public accommodations

and the right to vote in the 1950s. To appreciate that

significant yet suppressed movement for Black social change

against oppression, it will be necessary to take a very brief

historical journey. But before embarking on that journey we need

to define the term Black Power.

Following his arrest during a 1966 protest march in

Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael, aka, Kwame Ture, forcefully

demanded a change in the rhetoric and strategy of the civil

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rights movement (Carmichael, 2003). "We've been saying 'Freedom'

for six years, "Carmichael said. "What we are going to start

saying now is 'Black Power.'"(Ellis & Smith, 2005) In his

seminal work on the subject of Black Power with co-author Charles

V. Hamilton, "Black Power:" The Politics of Liberation", he says,

"the adoption of the concept Black Power is one of the most

legitimate and healthy developments in American politics and race

relations in our time. The concept of Black Power speaks to all

the needs mentioned in this chapter. It is a call for black

people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to

build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to

begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations

and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject the

racist institutions and values of this society." (Carmichael &

Hamilton, 1967, p. 44). With this definition in mind we can

begin to look at the issues facing the Black Power movement as a

protest movement against oppression in the United States and how

it was co-opted by the integrationist wing of the civil rights

movement.

The Beginning of Black Power Protest

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The advocacy for Black Power began at the very moment

Africans were forcibly boarded onto ships owned by various

European nations starting with the Portuguese and Spaniards, and

then the English, French, Dutch, and finally the Americans. Even

before these Africans arrived on the shores of the western

hemisphere to cultivate the land to support the insatiable

appetite of European colonial powers for sugar, protest for the

maintenance of Black Power were taking place. They started with

hunger strikes aboard crowded slave ships, leaps overboard to be

eaten by sharks rather than become someone's chattel. They

engaged in mutinous revolts in order to find a way back home to

freedom. There was at least one revolt for every eight to ten

voyages. There were the rebellions on the slave ships

Misericordia in 1532, the Mary in 1742, the Marlborough in 1752,

and the Amistad in 1879 just to mention a few. This does not

include many more in the Caribbean, such as those which

culminated in several successful direct actions against the

French leading to the Haitian Revolution in 1803. These protest

actions, often violent, led to Haiti becoming the first

independent Black nation in the Western hemisphere (Bell, 1995,

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2007; Carruthers, 1985; James,1962). In Brazil there was the

establishment of free Black states among the African Quilumbos

and the independent state of Palmares in Permanbuco (Clarke,

1991). In the United States there were revolts by Cato in 1739,

Gabriel in 1800, Vesey in 1822, and of course Nat Turner in 1831.

Yet, these are the more popular ones. Between 1791 and 1860 there

were more insurrections and rebellions than this present paper

cannot adequately properly address within the United States

(Aptheker, 1993).

The Black Struggle for Freedom

In the United States, starting in the 19th century Black

protest centered around quality education for the masses whether

free or enslaved, the right to citizenship and public

accommodations. There were many acts of manumission and

emancipation at this time reflecting a change in attitude toward

Africans. Once set free Africans, first and foremost, wanted

education and training in the duties of citizenship (Woodson,

1919). Subsequently, schools, missions, and churches were

established by benevolent and religious societies. Many of these

Africans became highly educated and were even employed in

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instructing the children of White settlers. Having disproved the

notion of mental inferiority among the Africans some educators

started advocating special schools for ‘colored’ children. These

schools were moving away from a religious dominated curriculum to

one which focused on the Africans past and attempted to integrate

practical knowledge and African cultural practices into their

curricula and pedagogy. (Woodson, 1919).

In fact, the intellectual progress of these Africans, as

they continued to be called until the late 19th century, was so

rapid, successful and widespread that a new attitude developed

among Whites concerning their progress. Now it was argued that

African-Americans could continue their intellectual growth and

progress but in a place other than the United States (Woodson &

Wesley, 1972). It was thought that a new colony, perhaps on the

African continent, would suffice which could serve as an economic

link back to the United States. This colony for the repatriation

of Free Africans was established by the American Colonization

Society (1821-1822) under President James Monroe on the West

coast of Africa and was called Liberia (1821), suggesting the

idea of giving Free African-Americans ‘liberty’ with its capital

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‘Monrovia’ named after President Monroe. It became an independent

colony on July 26, 1847. Its fundamental purpose was to remove

Free African-Americans from the Northern United States so that

they would not continue to influence those African-Americans

still residing in chattel slavery in the Southern states.

During the early period of the nineteenth century the mood

of the country was changing toward the idea of not educating

Africans. At this time there was a movement among Nativists

whites to prohibit the education of Africans in all places except

certain urban area. In order to maintain a state of mental-

slavery among African-Americans it was necessary to keep them in

the lowest state of ignorance and degradation thereby

perpetuating a continual state of apathy. Subsequently, measures

were enacted to prevent the association of progressive, educated

and intelligent Africans with those who were still enslaved. This

included the closing of schools established for the education of

Africans and the passage of laws, also known as the Black Codes,

making it a crime to teach any African children to read and write

(DuBois,1998). This approach, the Europeans believed, would

surely prevent any insurrections on the part of the Africans so

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that they would only be able to maintain their status as

"children" and "infants" in need of White philanthropy (Elkins,

1969). In order for Blacks to receive an education, however, they

had to be recognized by the government as citizens.

The idea of whether or not Blacks could be citizens of the

United States of course, was determined in the majority decision

of Justice Roger Taney in the famous Dred Scott vs. Sanford case

of 1857 (Fehrenbacher, 1978; Napolitano, 2009; Spring, 2004).

There was a clear difference between those entitled to equal

rights with equal character and abilities and those who were not.

This was a difference between those who were viewed as fit and

those who were examined as unfit. White society had to find a way

to reduce the number of people it viewed as part of the “bad” and

“defective” races from those who were seen as fit and normal.

Inadequate people were looked upon as the reverse of what was

normal. There was always a concern with solving the "Negro

Question", which is an ongoing discussion among Whites over what

to do with the Negroes when ever Blacks and Whites are in close

proximity. Since genocide and relocation were too expensive, what

other way could be created to address the removal and labeling of

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this undesirable Black population? That new way was found in

intelligence testing and besides it could eventually be turned

into a very profitable business (Watkins, 2004). This was also

related important to the question about who had access to

various public spaces in the United States.

The battle for access to public accommodations centered

around the famous 1896 Plessey vs. Ferguson case. On June 17th

1892, Homer Plessey boarded a white-only car of the East

Louisiana Railroad. When he refused to leave the car when asked

to do so by the whites, he was arrested and jailed. The Supreme

Court’s majority opinion, delivered by Justice Henry Billings

Brown, attacked the Thirteenth Amendment claim by distinguishing

between political and social equality. He reasoned that Africans

and whites were politically equal, in that they had the same

legal rights, but socially unequal because Africans were not as

socially advanced as whites. The decision in Plessey v. Ferguson

led to separate but equal facilities for Blacks and Whites across

the South leading to the creation of Jim Crow laws. After the

period known as Reconstruction (1860-1880) in which Blacks, with

the help of federal government troops intervention, were able to

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establish schools through the Freedmen's Bureau and vote into

office the highest number elected officials before or since that

time. These offices included municipals, state and federal

positions. As the century changed and new laws were enacted.

Nonetheless, Black people were beginning to realize that the

Constitution's laws were not binding upon everyone. Especially

after all of the gains from Reconstruction started being rolled

back. In fact, some clear distinctions were made in the law

concerning the status of Blacks in America.

The same Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment had

passed laws supporting segregated schools in the District of

Columbia and segregated schools run by the Freedmen’s Bureau, the

federal agency that was largely responsible for the creation of a

public education system in the South after the Civil War. In

1896, the year that Plessey was decided, Blacks in the South

relied on the public schools established by the Freedmen’s Bureau

as well as the African Free School system established through the

fund-raising efforts of Black churches and Northern charities.

Yet, this education was hardly free or universal. Blacks living

in the North hardly had it any better. Northern states still had

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widespread state-sponsored segregation in public schools in 1896.

This very brief history lesson was necessary in order to

understand the foundational sources of the Black Power movement.

This movement for respect and recognition within American society

has antecedents in the ideas of such people as Martin Robeson

Delaney (1812-1865; Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882); Dr.

Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912); Dr. Rufus Perry (1834-1895);

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859-1930); Leila Amos Pendleton

(1860-?); Dr. William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868-1963);

Drusilla Dunjee Houston (1876-1941); Marcus Moziah Garvey, and

others (Moses, 1996). These were some of the early pioneers of

the Black Power protest movement. With these factors established,

they allow us, while missing many key points to leap into the

second half of the 20th century.

The 20th Century and the Struggle between Civil Rights and

Black Power

During the second half of the 20th century, the

circumstances for Blacks, particularly in the South, were as

close to being in slavery without actually being there as one

could find. There was a de facto slavery system in place

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supported by what was known as "Jim Crow" laws in which most

blacks still worked on the same farms or plantations and for the

same owners or their descendants that had initially enslaved

them. Jim Crow was based on a white man from Kentucky named

Thomas D. Rice who performed a song called 'Jim Crow' that he had

heard sung by a Black man in the south and later this term was

attached to the American form of apartheid found in the south.

Its ideological background, however, was as a white backlash to

abolitionism (Pieters, 1992).

The abject conditions and oppression that Blacks faced in

the south forced many to travel north to places like Chicago in

search of a better life. While the earlier groups of emigrants

were able to find work as laborers in the stock yard, meat

packing plants and steel mills on the North and Southside, as

more Blacks started coming from the south, mainly through the

instigation of the Chicago Defender newspaper carried on Pullman

trains travelling throughout the south by its Porters, an

opportunity that ensured a Black middle-class existence, more

Blacks began to arrive in Chicago. Most Black men and women could

only get jobs, if they were fortunate , as domestic and personal

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servants (Spears, 1967). My grandmother served as a domestic for

some wealthy White people on the Gold Coast of Chicago until I

found a way for her not to do it anymore. I met those people and

I was appalled. They were as old as she was if not older.

Nonetheless, those Blacks began to thrive in what was had

been a Polish immigrant community on the Southside. As more

Blacks moved in from the South, the Polish people moved further

north into the unincorporated areas thus ultimately creating the

Black Belt of Chicago that originally stretched from 26rth street

on the North to 51st street on the south, from State street on

the west to Cottage Grove on the east (Lindberg, 1993). Today it

is an area undergoing massive gentrification known as

"Bronzeville". But things were tough in what became known as the

Black Metropolis (Cayton & Drake, ). Unfortunately, their

circumstances in Chicago did not appear much different from those

they had encountered while living in the south. Jim Crow did not

just followed them to the north, it met them when they got to

Chicago.

With the development of such organization as the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which

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grew out of the Niagara Movement in 1907 under the leadership of

W.E.B. Dubois and whose first president was Jewish, Joel

Spingarn; the National Urban League (NUL) in 1911 under the

leadership of Charles Johnson, one of the first Blacks with a

doctorate in Sociology from the new Chicago School of Sociology

under the tutelage of Robert Park who we the first president of

the Chicago Urban League; and the Congress of Racial Equality

(CORE) founded in 1942 using the sit-down techniques first made

famous by Mahatma Gandhi. This included marches, prayer vigils,

sit-in, and non-violent direct action. Later came the Southern

Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) founded in 1959 under the

leadership of Michael King who later changed his name to Martin

Luther King after the famous German founder of the Protestant

movement in Christianity. In 1960 when the Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed, we move into the modern

age of civil rights protest. Both SCLC and the NAACP attempted

to identify with the youthful student movement of SNCC but as

each clashed over ideological and organizational structure they

progressed toward competing paths (Meier & Rudwick, 1976).

The SNCC people were more radical and this was a threat to

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the more conformists, accommodationists, integrationists oriented

NAACP, SCLC, CORE and NUL. The NUL in particular has never seen

itself as a direct action protest movement organization. Their

main goal has always been the creation of an elite Black

middle/upper-class who would blend into the majority white

corporate structure and they are still like that today (Reed,

2008). The NAACP has always, through its Legal Defense Fund and

moderate nonviolent direct action, has always sought redress for

discriminatory practice through the courts and remain an

integrationists organization fixated on the desegregation of

American society as a whole. SNCC ultimately, with the cry of

"Black Power" scared the integrationist, white liberal supporters

of the civil rights movement and white American society in

general. But the Black Power movement was suppressed and there

were all sorts of plans implemented to ensure that Black Power

would not have its day.

These plans included the FBI's Counterintelligence Program

(COINTELPRO) in their secret war against the Black Panther Party

which destroyed them completely with the assassinations and

mysterious deaths of Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James

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Meredith, Medgar Evers, and countless others who were viewed as a

threat to the status-quo in America. Along with these activities

was the wholesale cooptation of the civil rights movement into a

government controlled takeover through the possible buying off of

some civil rights leaders at the expense of the very people they

were fighting for (Churchill & Vander Wall, 1988). But what went

wrong? Why didn't these wonderful plans to acquire Black Power

and self-determination manifest themselves? There are several

simple answers.

Retrospection and Conclusion

This paper has provided an extremely cursory review of the

Black Power Movement as a force for social change within from the

beginning of the arrival of Africans on the shores of the

Americas. Yet the Black community; as do people generally,

continue to view Black Power as a negative act, and one to be

used as a last resort. We have every reason to be optimistic

concerning the future, if our nation continues and increases its

responsiveness to the legitimate needs of Blacks. It is to our

discredit that violent protest had to serve as the impetus for

these actions. The Black Power movement is both cause and

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effect. Blacks are rapidly achieving the psychological

characteristics that are necessary prerequisites for upgrading.

It behooves society to be supportive (McDonald, Jr., 1975).

Conformity displaced community. Black Power advocates,

however, emphasized community through the instruments of Black

awareness and Black identity. The value differences between Black

society and the White community are so great that the racist

white majority must disparage and refute them. To preserve the

outline of the dream, it will be necessary to eradicate such

differences and to absorb or repress dissent. Therein lies the

threat and the reason why White society and the Black

integrationists/accommodationists charge advocates of Black Power

with reverse racism, denounce it as subversive, and suggest that

it as destructive of the best long-range interests of Black

people. What Whites see as separatism is actually Black Power in

the form of nationalism. What Whites charge as racism is Black

identity and Black community development to black people, and

what Whites fear as subversive is simply an attempt to overthrow

oppression by generations of Black men and women who are tired of

false promises and the nightmare-like realities of the dream.

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In a capitalists society, Black people are accustomed to

gauging actions by signs of material prosperity. Yet, obsessed

with success, most White are ill-prepared to perceive the merits,

and assess the implications of Black Power. Whites may pursue

their dreams but Blacks cannot, if they wish? Nevertheless,

through the ideology and practice of Black Power a growing number

of black people stand determined to achieve their dreams in the

land of their oppression (Zangrando & Zangrando, 1970).

The objective of fundamentally transforming Black America

was not successful. Hence, the majority of African Americans

still do not have meaningful access to political, economic, and

cultural resources of the country. The suppression of

revolutionary Black Power as they are expressed in the ideas of

Kwame Ture nationalism and the denial of self-determination for

the Black community, and the imposition of the politics of order

through a form of police state control, the criminal justice

system and a socially unjust society on the Black masses and

still perpetuate the underdevelopment of Black people in America.

Because of the absence of a national organization that can

effectively mobilize and organize Blacks to articulate the

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demands of the Black majority, presently existing civil rights

organizations and Black elites could not obtain adequate goods

and services for the Black community.

Conservatives, both Blacks and Whites, have made the case

that the current tragic problem of the Black majority is caused

by effects of welfare work disincentives, a ghetto-specific

culture, Black nationalism, lack of traditional American values,

and Black self-doubt. In their attempts to exonerate the racist

American capitalist system and its institutions, conservative

scholars and politicians blame the Black community and those

leaders who have struggled to liberate this community from

domination and exploitation. These conservatives assert that

Black problems are perpetuated by Black culture and the

ineffectiveness of the civil rights leaders; they criticize the

strategy of groups' rights and reliance on political power rather

than on individual initiatives and traditional values. These

arguments are merely policy oriented stabs at denial for the way

capitalism and those who have cultural capital have projected

their own misery upon those whom they have exploited for

excessive gain (Rainwater & Yancey, 1967).

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These same commentators imply that Black Power and Black

Nationalism does not help much in the challenge since it is too

infused with defensive grandiosity and given to bombast and

posturing (Harris & Wicker, 1988)). For conservative politicians

and intellectuals, the Black problem is internally created by the

unconscious replaying of oppression and racial self-doubt. These

conservatives ignore chains of external factors, such as the

political economy of racism, institutional discrimination, and so

on, that have contributed to Black poverty and underdevelopment (

Glaser & Moynihan, 1963).

Some conservative Blacks and Whites have even suggested that

to overcome their current problem, Blacks should abandon their

Black collective identity and deal with their individuality

(D'Souza, 1995, George, 2004)). What nation of people does such a

thing? Are Whites in America willing to give up their

nationalists leanings? In think not! There is no society that has

abandoned its collective cultural identity, including White

society, because individuals cannot exist out of collective

cultural identity. Based on the ideology of individualism, which

White elites falsely promote, conservative Blacks and some

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liberals reject the notion of reaching back and supporting the

struggle of the less fortunate Blacks. This self-serving ideology

justifies the burning of a bridge on which these conservative and

liberal Blacks crossed to the sides of the privileged groups

(Jalata, 1999).

The struggle for Black liberation through Black Power

requires "a victorious consciousness" that emerges from

cumulative African and Black experiences that includes an

epistemological grounding in original African civilizations,

cultures, traditions, and their ideological, cultural, and

political achievements. Systematic nationalism, victorious

consciousness, and Black Power awareness develops "when the

person becomes totally changed to a conscious level of

involvement in the struggle for his or her own mind liberation.

Only when this happens can we say that the person is aware of the

collective consciousness of will. An imperative of will,

powerful, incessant, alive, and vital, moves to eradicate every

trace of powerlessness" (Asante, 1988, p.49).

Hence, the future struggles of the Black people needs to

draw lessons from past movements. Specifically, the incorporation

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of the best elements of King's ideological and political

sophistication and pragmatism, Malcolm X's cultural heroism, and

Kwame Ture's ideas on Black Power. Mass militancy is absolutely

necessary for developing a future strategy of the Black struggle.

Furthermore, any future movement for Black Power also will need

to broaden its political base on country, regional, and

international levels based on the principles of popular democracy

and multiculturalism by forming an alliance with antiracist,

anticolonial, and progressive forces to expose and remove

obstacles to social justice, popular development, and self-

determination through educational mechanisms and organized

struggle (Jalata, 2002).

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