Black History Month
What is the Black Power Movement?
"The Black Power Movement was a radical grass-roots response to the perceived failure of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to change social conditions that kept African Americans impoverished and disenfranchised a century after the abolition of slavery. Especially attractive to a younger generation impatient with the slow pace of earlier civil rights activism, the Black Power Movement rallied African Americans to reject white American values as inherently racist, and to focus on black self-defense, self-determination, racial pride, and political and economic power.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) coined the term “Black Power” at a march in 1966 to protest the shooting of civil rights activist James Meredith. Racial integration, Carmichael argued, was a way of giving in to values that subtly perpetuated white supremacy. Emphasizing that African Americans who participated in peaceful demonstrations were met with brutality and arrests, he urged blacks to unite against the white establishment and to seize power for themselves. He articulated this belief further in his 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, coauthored with Charles V. Hamilton. In the book’s preface, the authors warned that their framework for radical change “represents the last reasonable opportunity for this society to work out its racial problems short of prolonged destructive guerilla warfare.”
"Black Power Movement." World of Sociology, Gale, edited by Joseph M. Palmisano, Gale, 1st edition, 2001. Credo Reference, https://proxy01.nwacc.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/worldsocs/black_power_movement/0?institutionId=5073. Accessed 27 Jan. 2022.
Black Power Web
Books
The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution by Call Number: E 185.615 .B54645 2016ISBN: 9781568585550Publication Date: 2016-09-13"Brilliant, painful, enlightening, tearful, tragic, sad, and funny, this photo-essay book is at its core about healing, and about the social justice work that still needs to be done in the era of hip-hop, Black Lives Matter, and the historic presidency of Barack Obama." -- Kevin Powell, author of The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy's Journey into Manhood "A brilliantly conceived volume. Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams demonstrate why the Panthers' story-its lessons and failures-even fifty years after its founding remains key to understanding national and international struggles for freedom and justice today." -- Cheryl Finley, professor and director of visual studies, Cornell University Even fifty years after it was founded, the Black Panther Party remains one of the most misunderstood political organizations of the twentieth century. But beyond the labels of "extremist" and "violent" that have marked the party, and beyond charismatic leaders like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, were the ordinary men and women who made up the Panther rank and file. In The Black Panthers, photojournalist Bryan Shih and historian Yohuru Williams offer a reappraisal of the party's history and legacy. Through stunning portraits and interviews with surviving Panthers, as well as illuminating essays by leading scholars, The Black Panthers reveals party members' grit and battle scars-and the undying love for the people that kept them going.
Black Power 50 by Call Number: E 185.615 .B546635 2016ISBN: 9781620971482Publication Date: 2016-09-06A sweeping 50th anniversary retrospective of Black Power in America and around the world that accompanies a major exhibit on black power at New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Black Power 50 includes original interviews with key figures from the movement, essays from today's leading Black Power scholars and over one hundred stunning images from the Schomburg's celebrated archives, offering a beautiful and compelling introduction to this pivotal movement.
Black Power Beyond Borders by Call Number: E 185.615 .B54664 2012ISBN: 9781137285058Publication Date: 2012-11-28This groundbreaking volume examines the transnational dimensions of Black Power - how Black Power thinkers and activists drew on foreign movements and vice versa how individuals and groups in other parts of the world interpreted 'Black Power,' from African liberation movements to anti-caste agitation in India to indigenous protests in New Zealand.
Stokely: A Life by Call Number: E 185.97 .C27 J67 2014ISBN: 9780465013630Publication Date: 2014-03-04Stokely Carmichael (chosen name Kwame Ture), the charismatic and controversial black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for "Black Power" during a speech one Mississippi night in 1966. A firebrand who straddled both the American civil rights and Black Power movements, Carmichael would stand for the rest of his life at the center of the storm he had unleashed that night. InStokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael, using his life as a prism through which to view the transformative African American freedom struggles of the twentieth century. During the heroic early years of the civil rights movement, Carmichael and other civil rights activists advocated nonviolent measures, leading sit-ins, demonstrations, and voter registration efforts in the South that culminated with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Still, Carmichael chafed at the slow progress of the civil rights movement and responded with Black Power, a movement that urged blacks to turn the rhetoric of freedom into a reality through whatever means necessary.Marked by the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., a wave of urban race riots, and the rise of the anti-war movement, the late 1960s heralded a dramatic shift in the tone of civil rights. Carmichael became the revolutionary icon for this new racial and political landscape, helping to organize the original Black Panther Party in Alabama and joining the iconic Black Panther Party for Self Defense that would galvanize frustrated African Americans and ignite a backlash among white Americans and the mainstream media. Yet at the age of twenty-seven, Carmichael made the abrupt decision to leave the United States, embracing a pan-African ideology and adopting the name of Kwame Ture, a move that baffled his supporters and made him something of an enigma until his death in 1998. A nuanced and authoritative portrait,Stokely captures the life of the man whose uncompromising vision defined political radicalism and provoked a national reckoning on race and democracy.
