Black Religion and Black Power

When most people (and many scholars) think of American religion and struggles for social justice, they tend to think first of the southern civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.  And to a certain extent  they would be right to do so.  There is no question that the fight against segregation in the Jim Crow South represented a high point of religious activism in American history – and many of my fellow bloggers here have contributed to our understanding of this moment. (Religious labor radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s represented another high point that our bloggers have been attentive to.)

Today though, I want to turn our attention to another historical moment, one chronologically proximate but often imagined to be antithetical to the civil rights movement – namely, Black Power.  Black Power has typically been conceived as northern (and western) whereas civil rights was southern, violent while civil rights was nonviolent, and secular in contrast to the inherent religiousness of civil rights.  When Stokely Carmichael first spoke the words “Black Power!” in 1966 (which, as an aside, he did in rural Mississippi not in the urban north) he gave voice to a growing shift in the predominant ideologies and strategies of the black freedom struggles, even if the component parts of Black Power (black nationalism, community control, self-defense) were not new. 


Later that same year two black college students in Oakland, California, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.  According to Robert L. Allen’s classic Black Awakening in Capitalist America(1969), the Black Panther Party Platform represented the “first concrete attempt to spell out the meaning of black power,” proposing a sweeping program that ranged from demands for employment and education to broader issues of freedom and self-determination.

Journalists were quick to contrast what they took to be the irrational rage of urban youth shouting “Black Power!” with caricatures of a more palatable southern Christian nonviolence – needless to say, neither of these characterizations approximated the reality of either. 

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