Black Power

The black community will have a positive image of itself that it has created ... Only when black people fully develop this sense of community, of themselves, can they begin to deal effectively with the problems of racism in this country. This is what we mean by a new consciousness; this is the vital first step (sic) (Carmichael and Hamilton 239-40).

Although it came to be identified with popular black nationalist activists such as Kwame Ture, Huey P. Newton and Amiri Baraka, Black Power was first “inspired by Christian liberal integrationists in the South, Richard Wright and Adam Clayton Powell in the North, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Islamic nationalism of Elijah Muhammad and, especially Malcolm X” (Austin 2006: 86).

When politician Adam Clayton Powell called the first national Black Power conference in 1966, the participants agreed that Black Power was to be understood as “the effective control and self-determination by men of color in their own areas. Power is total control of the economic, political, educational, and social life of our community from the top to the bottom” (qtd. in Austin 2006: 83). At the 1970 Atlanta conference, then known as the African Congress, the key elements of Black Power, it was decided, would refer to the following: “self-determination, self-sufficiency, self-respect and self-defense for black Americans” (Austin 2006: 84). Affirming this, Hamilton and Ture in their contribution in Black Power and Student Rebellion, explicate the need for African American redefinition by reclaiming their history and tracing “their roots to Africa,” by questioning the “values” and institutions of society, to “consolidate behind their own,” and thus “build a sense of community” (Carmichael and Hamilton 237-52). Furthermore, they call for a break from the

rhetoric and tone of the Civil Rights Movement, which they reason is in many ways incompatible with the expression of its politics.

The advocates of Black Power reject the old slogans and meaningless rhetoric of previous years in the civil rights struggle. The language of yesterday is indeed irrelevant: progress, non-violence, integration, fear of “white backlash,” coalition (Carmichael and Hamilton 248).

A crucial difference between the two approaches to African American liberation (namely, the Civil Rights Movement versus Black Power) was the attitude towards violent retaliation. Hamilton and Ture’s sentiment that white America “… must be made to understand that they must stop messing with black people, or the blacks will fight back!” was shared by an increasing number of the African American community (Hamilton and Ture 53).

As activists turned away from the political strategy of civil rights to that of Black Power, they also began to turn their identities away from America and toward Africa. If blacks were not allowed the full rights of American citizens, then maybe blacks were not American. These activists came to believe that black Americans, like Africans, were a colonized people (Austin 2006: 69).

Encouraged by the success of the African independence struggles, Black Power sought to redefine African American identities through the creation and maintenance of a unified African American community, which would be built upon reclaiming their shared history and culture, and by leading and supporting their own social and political organisations (Hamilton and Ture 1992: 37, 44). Hamilton and Ture’s chapter, White Power: The Colonial Situation, in which they liken the African American people to a colonised people, reaffirms the African colonial/“African American colony” analogy; a point of mutual identification (2-32).

Notably, as the decade progressed, Black Power activists found it necessary to distinguish themselves from other less politicised African Americans and civil rights believers by referring to themselves as “Black” and then by the 1970s as “Afrikan/African,”

as opposed to “negroes” or “Uncle Toms.” Austin attributes this insistence to the increase in Pan-Africanist influences and the need to define what a “true black” person was (Austin 2006: 59-60). This concern over terminology which ascribes qualities of blackness and therefore “authenticity” to an African American, and its correlation to the individual’s

commitment to black empowerment is reflected in The Spook.³³ Writing on the qualities inscribed to language which defined African Americans, Todd Boyd notes in his essay,

“Check Yo Self Before You Wreck Yo Self: The Death of Politics in Rap Music and Popular Culture,” which discusses the hip-hop group Arrested Development, the political quality of their music and their messages in opposition to “gangsta” rap music, that

‘African’ has recently been used to signify a spiritual connection with the continent and an Afrocentric political connection . . . Calling oneself African is supposed to demonstrate an advanced consciousness that eliminates any connection to America, and affirms one’s links with an Afrocentric cultural, political, and spiritual base . . . and African as defined by intellectual and political sophistication (331-32).

Pan-Africanism as articulated by Organization Us,³⁴ “has the emotional dimension of a common sense of belonging together, of a common origin of history, of common struggle and common projects to free African people – continental and diaspora . . . ” (Conyers 116).

Accordingly, African representatives from the continent and other black diasporans were invited, welcomed and present at all Black Power conferences, beginning with the second in 1967, and it was even hoped that the fourth conference could be held in Tanzania (Austin 2006: 85).

Pan-Africanist influences were perceptible at each conference as more attendees now had African names and chose to wear African clothing. From within the range of these fashions, the kente cloth design became synonymous with black cultural nationalist expression, thereby illustrating how, as Carol Magee concludes in Africa in the American Imagination, “ . . . kente . . . shifted from identifying a social class (royalty) of an ethnic group (the Asante) to also identifying a modern nation-state (Ghana), a continent (Africa), and a diasporic population (African Americans). In these instances dress quite literally fashions an identity” (101-02).

The Black Panthers, Organization Us and other Black Power organisations agreed (following selected Pan-Africanist principles) that educating African Americans, particularly young people in a way that developed in them a sense of pride and self-worth, was crucial to their struggle. Consequently, independent black schools, which were established to put into practice Pan-Africanist values, proliferated from 1970 onwards (Austin 2006: 101). These

33 In this chapter, under the sub-heading “Afrocentrism,” the matter of measuring qualities of black authenticity arises again, though on this occasion via the degree of application of Afrocentric philosophies to daily lives as a benchmark. It is taken up again in chapter three in a discussion of the term “Uncle Tom” and its use in The Spook.

34 In his book, Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics, Maulana Karenga – a founding member of the group – in his dedication refers to this political body in this way, as opposed to the commonly referenced “US Organization,” or “Us Organization.” Thus, it is referenced as such in this thesis.

schools were centred on especially black male re-socialisation, through which, it was hoped, the disaffected youth could ultimately become useful members of their communities, thereby contributing to the prosperity rather than the violence in them. Keith Mayes in his chapter, “A Holiday of Our Own,” in The Black Power Movement, gives a brief account of the genesis of these independent schools, which he notes took off from the African Congress held in 1970:

Though four years later he would distance himself from Organization Us and Maulana Karenga’s brand of black cultural nationalism, Amiri Baraka, “ . . . in 1970, gathered a significant group of national and international black political activists in Atlanta, Georgia”

for the African Congress. There,

. . . the Political Liberation workshop highlighted pan-Africanism as a possibility for an independent black nation . . . The education workshop established definitions for education and assessed the viability of Black Studies programs, Black Student Unions, black teachers and administrators, black colleges, and independent black schools (Mayes 239-40).

Peniel E. Joseph in his articulation of the resonances among African American political activists of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in The Black Power Movement writes, for example, that

[this] assassination, along with the Cuban Revolution and African decolonization efforts, provided the practical and ideological building blocks for a black radical solidarity that was fuelled by a resurgence in black nationalism, street corner speaking, study groups, and community organizing. African Americans learned important lessons from these experiences (256).

In contrast to the Civil Rights Movement whose activities were generally attributed to four organisations, the Southern Christian Liberal Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality (SCLC, NAACP, SNCC and CORE), the Black Power movement was more multifaceted and intricate in its structural organisation. It comprised several groups, such as the popular Black Panthers, Organization Us, or the Black Arts Movement (BAM), with varying arenas of activity, whose shared interest was in achieving black autonomy as a means to liberation (Austin 2006: 86-87).

Although Algernon Austin suggests that the rapid establishment of Black Power organisations should be seen as proof of the strength of the Black Power vision rather than a weakness (2009: 86), it could be argued that the conflicts between the ideological objectives or their implementation took much of the wind out of Black Power (Taylor 225). For

example, Huey P. Newton of the Black Panthers felt that Organization Us’s “focus on the arts and African traditions” were “reactionary,” while others claimed that such a focus “ignores the political and concrete, and concentrates on myth and fantasy” (Austin 2006: 88-89).

As a second example, the Nation of Islam, founded by Fard Muhammad, a man of Pakistani and New Zealand origin, insisted on the recognition that African Americans were descendants of the “Original People” of The Tribe of Shabazz, who were of “Asiatic” identity (Taylor 92). These assertions were contrary to the Pan-Africanist camps that argued that black people in America were from “black African” and not Arab or Asiatic descent (Austin 2006: 45).

Ultimately however, all these organisations were fighting for the same, fundamental ideal. As an example, Malcolm X highlighted this assertion when, following his break from The Nation, he insisted in his speech The Ballot or the Bullet, that black nationalism goes beyond individual religious preferences because he believed it to be a philosophy that inherently counters group divisions and conflicts:

What is so good about it is you can stay right in the church where you are and still take Black nationalism as your philosophy; you can stay in any kind of civic organization you belong to and still take Black nationalism as your philosophy; you can be an atheist and still take Black nationalism as your philosophy; this is the philosophy that eliminates the necessity for division and arguing.

This “same ideal” was that all African Americans, in order to transcend their current subject status in white America, should “develop an awareness of their cultural heritage,”

which dates back to that which began in Africa (Hamilton and Ture 38).