The Unknown History how the 60s Black Power Movement Started

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), and Mukassa Dada (Willie Ricks) during the "March against Fear" in Mississippi in 1966. It was this march where the "Black power" theme was first articulated on a mass level.

Understanding this critical history has never been more important than it is in 2019 and beyond.  Today, those who are genuinely concerned about the future of this planet (in every healthy way possible) are faced with unprecedented challenges.  Any elementary study of human progress reveals that the most efficient way to defeat any challenge is to understand the history of how the challenge came about.  The U.S. Black power movement of the 1960s and 70s generated significant victories that most of the population is still benefiting from today.  Before the civil rights and Black power movements, the status quo for everything in this society was rich European (white) men.  They were the only face in business, education, labor, politics, and popular culture.  Everyone else was simply a caricature for their usage and pleasure.  This is objective history that no one can factually dispute.  And, this is at least part of the reason so many white men are so angry and frustrated today.  The overwhelming majority of them are much to spineless and intellectually lazy to comprehend that the (very real) oppression they experience results from the capitalist system, not the people who are much more subjugated by the system than they are.  For most of them, the only way they can wrap their minds around what's happening now is by seeing things within the narrow and subjective vision that something they earned is being taken away from them.  What's actually happening is the civil rights and Black power movements simply opened up opportunities for people who previously had no options.  Since the capitalist system functions all the time based on the perception of scarcity e.g. there's not enough (this is how they convince people to compete against each other instead of them), the limited opportunities that exist within this backward society for people to advance has been forced by these movements to open up some and this has led to a few less chances for white men who previously enjoyed full and unchallenged access, at least compared to everyone else in society.  

And, the Black power movement didn't just create openings for African people.  This movement helped set the stage for many other social justice movements.  This happened because the entire premise of the Black power movement was we as African people have the right to define our existence in the way we see fit.  Within a society like this one where the forces of oppression depend upon complete dominance over the way people think to maintain control, it is impossible to overstate the significance of this focus by the Black power movement.  By taking this position, the movement ushered in a new and healthy way for African people to define ourselves.  For the first time, we began to question the European beauty standards that we routinely applied to ourselves.  We began to challenge institutional racism which was unquestioned policy throughout this country.  We began to bring in important questions such as the role Africa should play in our lives in the Western Hemisphere.  These ideas, like African cultural consciousness have always been around.  In fact, they never left us even though we left Africa, but the Black power movement made those ideas mass in character and it can certainly be argued that this had never previously happened within the U.S.  This revolutionary thinking and action created the conditions that led to the women's liberation movement, the (then labeled) gay liberation movement, the ablest movement, etc.  And, it doesn't matter in the least whether European LGBTQ and/or women, etc., acknowledge this fact, it cannot be be scientifically disputed.  So, any true students of history e.g. people genuinely concerned about figuring out how we move forward in advancing our struggle(s) for justice and forward progress, have to respect, study, and acknowledge the contributions of the civil rights movement and especially, the Black power movement.  I say especially the Black power movement because although the capitalist system works overtime to confuse people about the objectives of the reformist civil rights movement, because the Black power movement had this important component of African self-determination, the system saw this movement as a much greater threat than the civil rights movement.  All one has to do is study the pronouncements of elected leaders like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s counter intelligence program focused on destroying the Black power movement to confirm this reality.  So, understanding the Black power movement, from the perspective of those African activists and organizers who did so much incredible work for that movement, is essential.  And, the best way to understand that movement is to understand the forces and events that shaped its development.

Like everything else related to African people, the series of events that launched the Black power movement are shrouded in mystery and miss-information.  Since history within this capitalist system is taught from the standpoint that individuals make history, a clear and unquestionable lie, history here is always taught from an individualistic perspective.  This means that most people probably learned that the Black power movement resulted as a spontaneous event when Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael), the chairperson of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) stood on top of that trailer/bus in Greenwood, Mississippi in July of 1966.  The way the capitalists tell the history, Ture, just released from being arrested for the 26th time in five years for his work in the Southern U.S., was angry when he jumped on top of that trailer and made the famous (or infamous, depending upon your level of humanity) "Black power" speech that is credited with launching the movement.  The suggestion here is that that speech was a spontaneous individual act.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

That march in question where the Black power slogan was articulated was the result of the primary civil rights movement organizations agreeing to take up the "March against Fear" that was initiated by James Meredith.  Meredith was the first African to break Mississippi's educational segregation when he attended the state's university.  He wanted to stage a one person march, centered around him, to advance the notion that Africans shouldn't be afraid of violent racists in Mississippi.  True to their barbaric form, one of those Mississippi racists gunned down Meredith on the second day of his march.  As he recovered in the hospital, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, representing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Floyd McKissick, representing the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the then Stokely Carmichael, representing SNCC, convened a press conference in Memphis, Tennessee, U.S., to announce their intentions to continue Meredith's march.  During that press conference, King explained that the focus of the march would be to forward the civil rights movements dominant theme of "freedom now", but SNCC and CORE had other ideas.  

What's not commonly discussed is how different SNCC and CORE were to SCLC philosophically, strategically, and tactically.  As its name indicates, SCLC was an organization led by Southern U.S. religious leaders.  Its foundation was rooted in Southern U.S. Christian values practiced, at least by Africans, certainly not Europeans, of tolerance and forgiveness.  It was these themes that shaped SCLC's work throughout the civil rights movement.  In comparison, SNCC and CORE were organizations made up primarily of young people, many who were not even from the Southern U.S.  The other major difference that is very miss-understood today is SCLC was an organization dedicated to tactics of mobilization.  What is meant by this is SCLC's approach consisted of going to areas that were hot and staging big events to bring attention to the situation.  This is what defined SCLC, and Dr. King's, work in historical confrontations like the marches and sit ins in Birmingham, Alabama, U.S., with Sheriff Bull Conner, and the confrontation on the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Alabama.  SCLC would come in, have rallies, marches, press conferences, etc., and then be on to the next event.  Their organization wasn't structured to engage in long term organizing work.  In contrast, SNCC and CORE's work was defined by long campaigns in the same area.  Work that was outside the media's attention and always extremely dangerous.  Even the early work of these two organizations for the lunch counter sit ins and freedom rides were carried out using this model.  Since they had experienced that naked terrorism against them, SNCC and CORE activists were not anywhere as committed to the non-violence model that SCLC was.  That is not to say SCLC wasn't also exposed to violence because they certainly were.  Anyone standing up for dignity for African people was in danger.  Its just that the nature of SNCC and CORE's longer range work with projects like the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer) in 1964 and the Loundes County Freedom Organization (the original Black Panther Party) in Alabama in 1965, permitted them to have longer and closer access to the day to day realities of the Africans living in these environments.  This exposure allowed them to observe that these local Africans, accustomed to the limitless boundaries of these white terrorists, were seldom committed to non-violence because to be so was a certain death warrant.  So, these experiences radicalized the young militants in SNCC and CORE.  And this push towards the left led both organizations to reject the SCLC leaning philosophies of John Lewis as Chairperson of SNCC (now a U.S. congressperson) and James Farmer as leader of CORE.  This move to the left brought in the leadership of Carmichael in SNCC and Mckissick in CORE.  These much more militant organizations had no intention of continuing the "freedom now" format which they believed reflected a basis in asking racist whites to accept the humanity of African people and to suffer endlessly until this happened.  The new position of these organizations was best articulated by Ture (Carmichael) when he said "non-violence is nice because it appeals to the humanity of your enemies.  The problem is America has no conscience!  It has no humanity!"

With this different focus in approaching the Mississippi march, the differences emerged almost immediately.  SNCC and CORE wanted the militant Deacons for Defense organization to be a part of the march.  The Deacons were made up of African World War II veterans who formed in Louisiana in 1964 to protect civil rights workers.  They were armed, organized, and prepared to defend African people.  SNCC, CORE, and the local people, many who were either Deacons or had Deacons known to them, wanted the organization to participate, but Roy Wilkins, as leader of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP), and Whitney Young, leader of the National Urban League (two national civil rights organizations with a much more conservative approach) wanted no part of the Deacons.  The refusal of SNCC and CORE to relent on having the Deacons participate caused the two larger civil rights organizations to back away from actively supporting the march and they used all the resources at their disposal to pressure SCLC to do the same, but Dr. King, the principled man that he was, refused.  Dr. King stood firm even after Deacons leader Ernest Thomas stood in front of a group of locals, civil rights workers, and antagonist whites heckling them, to announce on the microphone that if any of the whites attempted violence against the Africans they would be met with retaliation.  

Meanwhile, SNCC was having strategy meetings to discuss how they could inject a different flavor into the march.  Feeling that they had a firm pulse on the sentiment of the masses of Africans in the region, and feeling confident they had the support of CORE activists, SNCC wanted to figure out how to make the march African focused in character.  They reasoned that the values of these civil rights marches were too heavily dominated by that of the white Northern liberal establishment.  They wanted the voice of the African people directly impacted by white supremacy to be the decisive factor in which direction the movement would head.  

After several strategy sessions around this question, SNCC decided that the "freedom now" theme needed to be dropped.  They decided that it should be replaced with "Black power."  They reasoned that "Black power" was a theme that personified African self-determination and control of our destiny.  They wanted to articulate that African people were going to assert our dignity in the Southern U.S., and everywhere else by - quoting Malcolm X - any means necessary!"  It was less than a year earlier that SNCC had shown clear signs of its advancing militancy by inviting Malcolm X to speak at a rally in Alabama.  It was there that Malcolm gave his famous "house slave, field slave" narrative. These lessons were not lost on the young SNCC militants.  They just had to figure out the correct strategic and tactical way to roll out the new militant theme?

It was decided that the approach would be to send out a small handful of SNCC militants days ahead of the march.  The role of these people would be to talk to the African laborers, church goers, sharecroppers, in town where the march was headed and engage these folks with ideological struggle around the new "Black power" theme.  Since the organizers would have to carry out this work individually, it was probably one of the most dangerous acts carried out in the entire civil rights movement.  One of the main organizers who carried out this work was Mukassa Dada, then known as Willie Ricks.  Along with young Carmichael, Cleve Sellers, Ruby Doris Robinson, and others, the young Willie Ricks represented the most militant leadership within SNCC.  This courageous African, still alive and extremely active in the Pan-African movement, still discusses in clear and inspirational detail, how he went into those quiet towns and spent time with so many people talking to them about the efforts SNCC was engaging in to bring self-determination to the African masses.  What Dada and SNCC discovered from his work was that the majority of Africans were fed up with the repression of white institutions in Mississippi.  Most people were prepared to immediately align themselves with SNCC's echoing of Malcolm's call for freedom "by any means necessary!"  

Once Dada and others informed SNCC of this advance intelligence from their work, there was struggle within SNCC about the reliability of this assessment.  Kwame Ture was always extremely honest about admitting that he had a very difficult time accepting Dada's assessment, believing that the masses were not quite ready for the "Black power" theme to be dropped upon them.  So, once the young Carmichael was released from prison that dusty day in July, he was indeed bitterly angry, but the decision for him to launch the "Black power" theme from that trailer was a collective one, agreed upon by SNCC's on the ground leadership in Mississippi.  In fact, the young Carmichael had to be prodded by the young Ricks and others to use the theme in that speech.  Understanding and respecting organizational discipline, the young Carmichael, against his own judgment, prepared to make his speech from that trailer.  The marchers listened to speeches that night from Carmichael, Dr. King, and others.  The masses were angered after days of mistreatment and disrespect by local politicians, police, and national guards-people.  During one tense moment earlier, King had to physically restrain the angered Carmichael when the young man attempted to charge a national guardsman who had roughly pushed Dr. King backwards.  All of these emotions were on display as the marchers waited in front of that trailer in Greenwood that night in July, 1966.  The police and guard stood by ready to attack the marchers.  Masses of racist whites stood by shouting insults and threats.  The marchers were well aware that the focus of the so-called "authorities" was 100% on controlling them, not lifting a finger to do anything about the violence prone whites who were the only threat to anything that night.  All of these factors created an unbelievable energy when Carmichael prepared to give his speech.  Continuously spurned on by the young Ricks and others, Carmichael painted a vivid picture of the centuries old disrespect and oppression white capitalist society had reaped upon the African masses.  In his description, he explained that appealing to the white power structure for justice was a tactic who's time had passed.  He made it clear that now was the time that African people began to take our destiny into our own hands, no matter what the cost.  He expressed how we had to make this decision for survival and that we had to have the courage to do this for the future of our people.  The container for this process, he articulated, was that we needed "Black power."  The response of the people was immediately and overwhelmingly enthusiastic.  It was so favorable that it admittedly took the young Carmichael by surprise.  He was able to quickly adapt and he began having the assembled masses chant the theme over and over; "Black power!  Black power!  Black power!"  At this moment, the civil rights movement would never be the same.

For those who have not truly studied history, its going to be very difficult for you to properly understand how significant that moment was.  Up to that point, the overwhelmingly dominant narrative for African people in the U.S. was that we must do any and everything we can to fit into this racist U.S. society.  Of course, we realize this thinking is still very prevalent, but back at this time there was no Kemitic movement.  There was no Black Lives Matter movement.  No African centered thinking being discussed on any mass level.  The point is although none of those things are where we want them to be, they are platforms for us to build what we need to be free.  In other words, they are without question steps in the right direction and none of those steps would even exist without the "Black power" movement.  Every movement speaking through an independent African, Black mindset, whatever you wish to call it, was spawned by the "Black power" movement and those like minded organizations and individuals like the Nation of Islam and Universal Negro Improvement Association, that existed before this movement, were bolstered by its existence.  No one can dispute this.  

The "March against Fear" was the last major civil rights march and the reasons for this are clear.  The call for "Black power" expanded and captured the imagination of Africans everywhere, not just in the Southern U.S.  The emerging "Black power" movement moved the focus beyond integration and into one that explored the impacts of class oppression by the capitalist system.  Its not a debate about whether we understand these components yet or not.  The point is this movement helped develop the conditions where the discussion is even able to take place today.  And, the conversation is taking place.  People have always distorted the "Black power" message to fit their aspirations to find a niche within the capitalist system.  Some have attempted to define it as black capitalism.  These people use "Black power" politics as a cover for their exploitation of African people for financial gain using a black nationalist message to couch their thievery.  All one has to do is search youtube to find any number of these hucksters who attempt to deceive our people in the name of African liberation.  And, of course, there is absolutely no shortage of racist whites, pretending to be friends to African people, who do everything they can to disrupt our ability to have self-determination because they understand that the capitalist system is based on keeping us oppressed.  They know their comfort is tied to our oppression.  They realize our liberation from that system automatically means a change to their lives and they don't want that.  So, they work overtime to convey the message that an individualist neo-colonial politician like Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Maxine Waters, or Kamala Harris, is "Black power."

The only accurate definition for "Black power" in 2019 and beyond is the same definition that the young Stokely Carmichael articulated from that trailer in 1966.  As he often articulated throughout his life, "Black power" properly defined is the "power of the organized masses of African people."  This can never happen through individual politicians operating within the capitalist system.  Even if some of these politicians have the best intentions, which most of them do not, at best, this approach means the masses of people placing their complete faith in these individuals, and this system, to solve our problems.  We clearly have an extensive collection of evidence to demonstrate this approach is worthless to the masses of African people. And, whomever still acts confused about the contradictions with that in 2019 is either unaware of history or they purposely want that confusion to exist to shield their individualistic objectives to use our struggle for their personal power and advancement. 

​Some of those people present at that 1966 rally continued to live their lives with integrity.  They gave us a glimpse into what real "Black power" should look like today.  Kwame Ture, who changed his name to that in 1977 to pay respect to Kwame Nkrumah and Seku Ture, clearly addressed this often when he said "the highest expression of Black power is Pan-Africanism."  And, Mukassa Dada, the former Willie Ricks, is a clear example of Kwame's words as Dada is a tireless champion for Pan-Africanism today.  He travels the African world helping organize for Pan-Africanism much the same way he traveled those lonely roads in 1966 in Mississippi.  Other SNCC veterans like Seku Neblitt, who today lives in Ghana, and organizes for Pan-Africanism, continue to carry this torch.  Bob Brown is another such example and there are many others.  

If you leave this piece with any other thought, please let it be that collective, disciplined study and work is what's needed to alleviate our suffering.  Individual actions won't solve the problem.  If they could, with all the rampant individualists active, we would have been free a long, long, time ago.  What's still missing, as Kwame Ture clearly told us many times, is the power of the organized masses.  There's no shortcut.  No easy way.  No quick desktop icon.  Only the consistent and dedicated work to organize the masses of our people is the solution.  Despite the efforts of imperialism to keep us confused, this was the clear message articulated by SNCC 50+ years ago in Mississippi and our ancestors all over the African world today wait patiently for us to finally and decisively figure that out in order to make it happen once and for all.