Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.'s “Black Power: A Form of Godly Power” (1967)
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.'s “Black Power: A Form of Godly Power,” a chapter in Keep the Faith, Baby!, is an expansion of Powell's 1965 “Black Position Paper for America's 20 Million Negroes.” The chapter demonstrates the congressman's forcefulness on the issues of civil and political rights and articulates his particular conception of Black Power, which was neither black nationalist nor integrationist per se. Powell served in Congress during a period that saw great political advances in black self-determination around the world—from the black freedom movement in the United States, which succeeded in dismantling Jim Crow laws (the legal segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans in the southern states) to the anticolonial movements in Africa, which led to the independence of more than a dozen nations. Black America was putting itself forward, on the national and international stage, as linked to Africa and other parts of the diaspora, where people of African...
