The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field

Abstract

By all rights, there no longer should be much question about the meaning-at least the intended meaning-of Black Power," the journalist Charles Sutton observed in January 1967. "Between the speeches and writings of Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc)," Sutton continued, "the explanations of Floyd McKissick, director of the Congress of Racial Equality (core), and the writings of more than a score of scholars and commentators, the slogan and its various assumptions have been fairly thoroughly examined." 1 Clearly Sutton was wrong. Despite efforts to define it both then and today, "black power" exists in the American imagination through a series of iconic, yet fleeting images-ranging from gun-toting Black Panthers to black-gloved sprinters at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics-that powerfully evoke the era's confounding mixture of triumph and tragedy. Indeed, the iconography of Stokely Carmichael in Greenwood, Mississippi, Black Panthers marching outside an Oakland, California, courthouse, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's wanted poster for Angela Davis serves as a kind of visual shorthand to understanding the history of the era, but such images tell us very little about the movement that birthed them. This fact has been complicated by conventional civil rights narratives, which, until recently, accepted as wisdom the idea that black power undermined struggles for racial justice. Those narratives differed more in their level of condemnation than in their analysis of the black power movement's self-destructive impact. The embrace, at times, of violent rhetoric, misogyny, and bravado by black power advocates have made them and their struggles easy targets for demonization and dismissal. For instance, black power stands at the center of declension narratives of the 1960s: the movement's destructiveness poisoning the innocence of the New Left, corrupting a generation of black activists, and steering the drive for civil rights off course in a way that reinforced racial segregation by giving Peniel E. Joseph is a professor of history at Tufts University. I would like to offer thanks to Ed Linenthal, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Paul S. Boyer, and the anonymous readers who helped revise this essay. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Rhonda Y. Williams, Jeremi Suri, and Yohuru Williams for their critical evaluations of earlier drafts. The opportunity to participate and test out ideas at the Smithsonian's Black Power Symposium and the University of North Carolina's Long Civil Rights Movement Conference proved invaluable. Much of the writing of this essay was done at Harvard University's Charles Warren Center, where this work benefited from fellows participating in the "Race-Making and Law-Making in the Long Civil Rights Movement" seminar. Thanks especially to

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