Fifty summers ago, SNCC’s chairman, Stokely Carmichael, joined civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to steer the treacherous Mississippi March Against Fear. The massive protest careened through Mississippi cotton towns, organizing residents and battling segregationists. By June 16, 1966, the March had stopped in Greenwood, Mississippi, one of the many majority Black polities still ruled by White minorities. “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothing,” Carmichael shouted at a Greenwood rally. “What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” “What do you want?” Carmichael screamed. “Black Power!” disempowered Greenwood Blacks screamed back.
Carmichael’s exclamation rang true in 2016–the year that marked its fiftieth anniversary. Nearly a half a century later, activist Alicia Garza wrote a love letter that proclaimed that “Black Lives Matter,” igniting a movement that would mature in Black Power’s golden anniversary. Like Sixties Black power activists, Garza has been led by notions of self-determination, “self-actualization, self-love and being really rooted in who we are unapologetically.” This ethos has spread like wildfire, with cities and college campuses ablaze with sit-ins and protests filled with activists demanding universal recognition of black people’s humanity and rights. In 1966, Carmichael ignited a movement. Today’s activists are channeling his unequivocal demand into a new movement that both pays homage to and expands Black power’s central ideals and symbols.
The Black Power Series is the first scholarly series dedicated to chronicling Black Power, its antecedents, and its capacious legacy. For more information on submissions, please visit the official series website.
