Stokely Carmichael: “Black Power”

Impact

Although he was already questioning the direction of SNCC at the time of his UC Berkeley speech, Carmichael was then at the height of his prominence as SNCC’s representative speaker both on and off college campuses. Along with King and Malcolm X, he was a leading figure in both the civil rights and the antiwar movements. All three men saw these movements as linked with issues of international human rights, yet there would be much debate over the successes and failures of the civil rights and antiwar movements as well as the extent of their broader influence. The year after the UC Berkeley speech, President Lyndon Johnson would name the first African American Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, but on April 4, 1968, King would be assassinated. Long before SNCC disbanded in the 1970s (a new branch, however, has recently been established at the University of Louisville), Carmichael would move to a more militant stance as a member of the Black Panther Party.

On October 15, 1966, two weeks before Carmichael’s UC Berkeley speech, the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California, by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton with the goal of protecting African American neighborhoods from police brutality. Carmichael’s comments on the absurdity of counseling nonviolence to African Americans rather than to the white supremacists who constantly perpetrated violence against black people were indicative of the Black Panthers’ stance on condoning violence in self-defense. The Panthers originally espoused black nationalism but ultimately came to reject that view and favor Socialism without race consciousness. The organization was known for its Ten-Point Program and its demand that African American men be exempted from the draft. In addition to Seale and Newton, the best known of the Panthers was Eldridge Cleaver, who edited its newspaper, raising circulation to two hundred fifty thousand. The Panthers quickly grew to national prominence, but its chapters in cities across the country became subject to extensive police harassment and federal surveillance ordered by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. At least two dozen members of the Panthers died at the hands of law enforcement agencies before the group faded out of existence in the 1970s.

Regardless of the fate of the Black Panther Party, the Black Power movement, in which Carmichael was a major leader, was a significant chapter in American history. On the international front, efforts to stop the Vietnam War were ongoing and growing—with the elevating attention of the public reflecting Carmichael’s association of the anti–Vietnam War movement with the broader international human rights and anticolonialist movements—prompting President Johnson to announce that he would not run for reelection in 1968. Meanwhile, both the war and the antiwar movement continued to escalate until the years of conflict at last drew to a close: the shootings of unarmed antiwar protesters by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio took place on May 4, 1970; the last American was helicoptered off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, marking the end of the Vietnam War, on April 29, 1975.