Look Out Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama!

Something else emerged from the Meredith march - a radical shift in emphasis and tactics within the civil rights movement. It soon became clear that the young black leaders in SNCC and CORE had lost faith not only in the efficacy of nonviolent methods but in the integrationist goals they had been pursuing. Integration would be meaningless, they felt, if the economic and political realities of life in the United States remained unchanged: black people, however, would be unable to change these realities if they remained powerless within their own communities. A time of consolidation had come, a time when black people had to act and speak for themselves rather than be helped or interpreted by their "white friends".

There has been much outright condemnation of the Black Power position, and liberal critics have called it "spiritually bankrupt." Nonetheless, Julius Lester writes: "Black Power has become the microscope and telescope through which black people look at themselves and the world. It has enabled them to focus their energies on something while they prepare for the day of reckoning."

Here, by a SNCC Field Secretary, is a fiery and forthright exegesis of Black Power - its meaning, its historical roots in the ideas of Frederick Douglass, Martin J. Delaney, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Du Bois, and the bitter criticism of American society that it embodies.