Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall
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SNCC activists—Bob Moses, Cleveland Sellers, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Gwendolyn Patton, and John Wilson, to name just a few—passionately opposed the war in Vietnam and were active in the movement to end it, the majority of those featured in the previous discussion—Zinn, Zimmerman, Nolan, Hansen, and O’Connor—were white. Although white activists retained their commitment to the cause of black freedom, the Vietnam War increasingly occupied their attention and, as noted, the developing ideology of Black Power encouraged this. Indeed, SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael appeared to countenance such a development. Writing in the New York Review of Books, he explained that one of the “most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities—which is where the racism exists—and work to get rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley.” Carmichael continued, “they admonish blacks to be nonviolent; let them preach nonviolence in the white community…. Let them work to stop America’s racist foreign policy.”93
The emergence of Black Power was, as many scholars have recognized, a tremendously important development in the history of the African American freedom struggle. Robert Cook and David Burner, for example, both cite Black Power as one of the principal reasons for the collapse of the civil rights movement.94 Black Power first came to public attention in the summer of 1966. In Greenwood on June 17, SNCC activists Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks popularized the controversial slogan. John Dittmer has described how an angry Carmichael, out on bail, told an agitated crowd of 600 mostly local people that “this is the 27th time I have been arrested—I ain’t going to jail no more, I ain’t going to jail no more.” Then, as the crowd became increasingly enthusiastic, he repeatedly yelled “We want black power!” The SNCC leader continued, “Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned tomorrow to get rid of the dirt … from now on when they ask what you want, you know what to tell ’em. What do you want?” The crowd thundered back, “Black Power.”95 The powerful cry was no spontaneous eruption, though. Willie Ricks had tested it on crowds during the previous week and urged Carmichael to use it. Moreover, SNCC as an organization had been moving toward Black Nationalism since the cataclysmic summer of 1964.
Black Power’s meanings have always been fiercely contested and, despite the efforts of scholars, it remains a notoriously hard concept to define. The Black Power label can encompass such diverse philosophies as cultural nationalism, black capitalism and black separatism, but some generalizations can be made. Black Power ideology drew on the example and rhetoric of Malcolm X, emphasized racial pride and solidarity with nonwhite peoples, identified Afro-America with the worldwide struggle against white “imperialism,” advocated the support and development of black-controlled institutions, and endorsed self-defense. Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, a political scientist, provided one of the best intellectual definitions of Black Power in their 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. They attacked integration as a middle-class obsession, called on African Americans to abandon the tactic of coalition with white liberals, and encouraged the formation of locally based community organizations and political parties. Ultimately, though, Carmichael and Hamilton did not promote black separatism; instead, they placed African American development within the pluralist tradition of American politics. They wrote, in an oft-quoted passage, that “the concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise … before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks.”96
Most of white America, however, cared little for the subtleties and distinctions of the ideology, and focused instead on its alleged racism and violence. This misunderstanding was aided not only by “media misperception and manipulation,” but also by mainstream civil rights leaders and their white liberal allies.97 The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, never a friend of the radicals, defined Black Power as “the father of hatred and the mother of violence. It is a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan.” The Association simultaneously viewed the development of Black Nationalism within SNCC and CORE as an opportunity to recruit “mature and balanced young people” from the “defections in their ranks.”98 Vice President Hubert Humphrey declared that “racism is racism—and there is no room in America for racism of any color.”99 Of course some black power militants were also to blame, especially when they went out of their way to shock whites by using provocative language. CORE leader Floyd McKissick’s comment to reporters, for instance, that “the greatest hypocrisy we have is the Statue of Liberty. We ought to break the young lady’s legs and point her to Mississippi” was never likely to help secure a favorable reception for Black Power.100
Although historians have followed contemporaries in highlighting the discontinuities between the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and the nonviolent direct action protests of the first half of the decade, a new historiography is emerging that challenges such assumptions. In his study of the Monroe, North Carolina civil rights leader Robert F. Williams, for example, Timothy B. Tyson has skillfully demonstrated that the conventional dichotomy is simplistic, and that it often obscures rather than enlightens the scholarly discussion. According to Tyson the civil rights and Black Power movements “grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom.” He has shown that “virtually all of the elements that we associate with Black Power were already present in the small towns and rural communities of the South where the civil rights movement was born.”101 Both Black Power and nonviolent direct action, then, were deeply embedded in the history of the black freedom struggle.
Indeed, the historical roots of Black Power, and the traditions from which it drew strength and inspiration are striking. Armed self-defense was nothing new—it had an established tradition in the rural South. During the 1950s, legendary NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall relied on armed guards and even machine guns for protection when he argued controversial cases in the Deep South, while black activists like Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham and Medgar Evers in Mississippi used guns to defend themselves.102 It was not just Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael who promoted international solidarity among people of color. In A Rising Wind (1945), the NAACP’s Walter White had written that the Second World War had given American blacks a sense of kinship with other non-white peoples—“he senses that the struggle of the Negro in the United States is part and parcel of the struggle against imperialism in India, China, Burma, Africa.”103 Roy Wilkins had marched in support of Ethiopian freedom during the 1930s.
In the build-up to Freedom Summer, SNCC members had engaged in an emotional debate about whether white volunteers should be restricted from leadership roles in the movement, and whether their presence was welcome at all. They may have been aware that, in the 1940s, A. Philip Randolph had insisted that his March on Washington Movement be all black.104 Moreover, the white activist Anne Braden, who had recruited SNCC’s first white field secretary in 1961, had long believed that “the job of white people who believe in freedom is to confront white America.”105 The professed ideals of the Beloved Community had always existed alongside an instinctive caution, if not hostility, among many black activists about white participation in the freedom movement. When SNCC expelled its few remaining white members in December 1966, and when Black Power militants called on whites to organize whites and blacks to organize blacks, many liberals were indignant. But it is illuminating to recall Bayard Rustin’s speech to a 1964 SNCC conference. The veteran nonviolent activist declared that “the time has come for the white students who want to aid the civil rights movement to stop putting on blue jeans and going to Mississippi to organize Negroes.” “Instead,” he advised, “do something that is harder and much less glamorous: stay home, go into white communities, work as hard as any black SNCC worker to convince the white people to support this movement.”106 The exhortation of Rustin, a leading exponent of liberal coalitionism, bears an uncanny resemblance to the sentiments expressed by Carmichael, a Black Nationalist. It clearly indicates that the relationship between the Black Power and nonviolent wings of the civil rights movement need further examination.
In addition to SNCC’s embrace of Black Power in 1966, the Congress of Racial Equality was also adopting a more radical orientation. As Robert Cook has shown, the organization’s increasing focus on organizing in black urban neighborhoods resulted in it