“We Were Going to Fight Fire with Fire”: Black Power in the South

Abstract

For many students of the 1960s, June 16, 1966 continues to mark the beginning of the history of Black Power in America. That day, Stokely Carmichael, the young and flamboyant chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), introduced two words that would dominate the memory of the black freedom movement in the following decades. Standing on a wooden makeshift podium in Greenwood, Mississippi, which was one stop on the Meredith March’s tour across the Magnolia state, Carmichael told some 600 blacks that the “only way” to stop white racists from “whuppin* ” African Americans would be “to take over.” “What we gonna start saying now,” he shouted, “is Black Power!” This exclamation struck a chord with his audience. It roared back in unison: “Black Power!”¹ Listening to the angry chants of Carmichael and seeing armed members of the Deacons for Defense and Justice—a black self-defense organization from Louisiana—protect the march, puzzled observers feared the dawn of a new and violent era. To many, Black Power seemed to symbolize both an abrupt rupture with the nonviolent and integration ist vision of Martin Luther King and the advent of violent upheavals in northern black communities. In the following decades many historians adopted and perpetuated this interpretation, portraying the black freedom movement’s radicalization as a sudden, essentially northern, phenomenon that seemed to betray the ideals of the southern civil rights struggle.²