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Famous Like Me > Actor > P > Black Power

Profile of Black Power on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Black Power  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 4th July 1941
   
Place of Birth: Cuba
   
Profession: Actor
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

Black Power is a slogan which describes the aspiration of many people of varying degrees of African descent for national self-determination. The term describes a conscious choice for blacks to nurture and promote their own models of value, rather than look for other races to validate them. It calls for Blacks to identify their historical struggle and work to help themselves.

United States

The chant of "Black Power" was popularized, but not authored, in the U.S. by Stokely Carmichael (now known as Kwame Ture) in the 1960s. Stokely Carmichael was an organizer and agitator working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

The movement for Black Power in the U.S. came during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Many SNCC members were becoming critical of the political line articulated by Martin Luther King Jr., among others, which advocated non-violent resistance to racism, and the ultimate goal of desegregation. SNCC members thought that blacks in the U.S. would be dominated by whites as long as they were citizens of a majority white nation. Because of this, SNCC adopted the principle of self-determination (i.e. Black Power, in the case of black people).

SNCC also saw that some white racists had no qualms about the use of violence against blacks in the U.S. who would not "stay in their place," and that accomodationist Civil Rights strategies failed to secure sufficient concessions for blacks. As a result, as the Civil Rights Movement wore on, more radical, violent undertones (best exemplified by groups like the Black Panthers) intensified and began to more aggressively challenge white hegemony.

Willie Ricks won the support of thousands, whenever he spoke to a crowd of working-class Africans, when he chanted "Black Power" — but even as that idea was becoming dominant among the masses, who faced the reality of everyday warfare being waged against them and their community, Martin Luther King continued to campaign for what he termed an "integrated power."

The idea of integrated power is that once racism has been broken down, and everyone is "color-blind", "blacks" will be able to fully assimilate into U.S. society.

Opponents reply that this goal of assimilation robs Africans of their heritage and dignity. Omali Yeshitela, leader of the Uhuru Movement (), and Chairman of the African People's Socialist Party, argues that Africans have historically fought to protect their lands and cultures and freedoms from European colonialists, and that any integration into the society which has stolen your people and your people's wealth is an act of treason — it is "uniting with imperialism."

Critics of African Internationalism or "Black Power" often remark that African-Americans are no longer truly "African," since this group is almost completely Western in its cultural orientations---blacks are indeed "as American as apple pie and baseball," that the toil of their ancestors help to lay the foundations of the United States, and they are citizens who are entitled to all rights guaranteed by being a citizen.

Some Black Power activists, calling themselves "New Afrikans", believe that Black Americans should have their own independent nation made up of the Black Belt of the United States, because that contiguous region is already majority Black.

Yet another sector of Black nationalists are the "cultural nationalists" who often advance "Pan-Africanism", which has been criticized for its lack of explicit alignment with the interests of the poor and working-class Africans above those of the petty-bourgeoisie.

The first person to use the term Black Power in its political context was Robert F. Williams, a writer and publisher of the 1950s and 60s.

Related topics

  • Black anarchism
  • Black Panthers
  • Stokely Carmichael
  • Eldridge Cleaver
  • Marcus Garvey
  • Huey P. Newton
  • Bobby Seale
  • SNCC

See also

  • White Power
  • White pride and Black pride
  • White nationalism and Black nationalism
  • White supremacy and Black supremacy
  • White separatism and Black separatism

Further reading

  • Breitman, George. In Defense of Black Power. International Socialist Review Jan-Feb 1967, from Tamiment Library microfilm archives. Transcribed & marked up by Andrew Pollack for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line. Retrieved May 2, 2005.
  • Carmichael, Stokely. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Position Paper: The Basis of Black Power. Retrieved May 2, 2005.
  • SNCC Project Group. SNCC Issues: Black Power. SNCC 1960-1966: Six years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Retrieved May 2, 2005.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Black Power