some black power militants were also to blame, especially when they went out of their way to shock whites by using provocative language. CORE leader Floyd McKissick’s comment to reporters, for instance, that “the greatest hypocrisy we have is the Statue of Liberty. We ought to break the young lady’s legs and point her to Mississippi” was never likely to help secure a favorable reception for Black Power.100
Although historians have followed contemporaries in highlighting the discontinuities between the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and the nonviolent direct action protests of the first half of the decade, a new historiography is emerging that challenges such assumptions. In his study of the Monroe, North Carolina civil rights leader Robert F. Williams, for example, Timothy B. Tyson has skillfully demonstrated that the conventional dichotomy is simplistic, and that it often obscures rather than enlightens the scholarly discussion. According to Tyson the civil rights and Black Power movements “grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom.” He has shown that “virtually all of the elements that we associate with Black Power were already present in the small towns and rural communities of the South where the civil rights movement was born.”101 Both Black Power and nonviolent direct action, then, were deeply embedded in the history of the black freedom struggle.
Indeed, the historical roots of Black Power, and the traditions from which it drew strength and inspiration are striking. Armed self-defense was nothing new—it had an established tradition in the rural South. During the 1950s, legendary NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall relied on armed guards and even machine guns for protection when he argued controversial cases in the Deep South, while black activists like Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham and Medgar Evers in Mississippi used guns to defend themselves.102 It was not just Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael who promoted international solidarity among people of color. In A Rising Wind (1945), the NAACP’s Walter White had written that the Second World War had given American blacks a sense of kinship with other non-white peoples—“he senses that the struggle of the Negro in the United States is part and parcel of the struggle against imperialism in India, China, Burma, Africa.”103 Roy Wilkins had marched in support of Ethiopian freedom during the 1930s.
In the build-up to Freedom Summer, SNCC members had engaged in an emotional debate about whether white volunteers should be restricted from leadership roles in the movement, and whether their presence was welcome at all. They may have been aware that, in the 1940s, A. Philip Randolph had insisted that his March on Washington Movement be all black.104 Moreover, the white activist Anne Braden, who had recruited SNCC’s first white field secretary in 1961, had long believed that “the job of white people who believe in freedom is to confront white America.”105 The professed ideals of the Beloved Community had always existed alongside an instinctive caution, if not hostility, among many black activists about white participation in the freedom movement. When SNCC expelled its few remaining white members in December 1966, and when Black Power militants called on whites to organize whites and blacks to organize blacks, many liberals were indignant. But it is illuminating to recall Bayard Rustin’s speech to a 1964 SNCC conference. The veteran nonviolent activist declared that “the time has come for the white students who want to aid the civil rights movement to stop putting on blue jeans and going to Mississippi to organize Negroes.” “Instead,” he advised, “do something that is harder and much less glamorous: stay home, go into white communities, work as hard as any black SNCC worker to convince the white people to support this movement.”106 The exhortation of Rustin, a leading exponent of liberal coalitionism, bears an uncanny resemblance to the sentiments expressed by Carmichael, a Black Nationalist. It clearly indicates that the relationship between the Black Power and nonviolent wings of the civil rights movement need further examination.
In addition to SNCC’s embrace of Black Power in 1966, the Congress of Racial Equality was also adopting a more radical orientation. As Robert Cook has shown, the organization’s increasing focus on organizing in black urban neighborhoods resulted in it recruiting more African American activists, thereby changing its racial composition. By 1964, 80 percent of CORE’s National Action Committee were black and the group’s overall white majority was quickly disappearing. Moreover, contact with ghetto blacks also increased CORE’s receptivity to the black separatist outlook of groups like the Nation of Islam, which exerted a powerful influence in the northern cities. By the mid-1960s, CORE’s attachment to the principles of Gandhian nonviolence was fading, and in July 1967 the term “multi-racial” was expunged from the organization’s constitution.107
New Black Power groups also emerged. The most (in)famous was the Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in Oakland, California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in October 1966. Inspired by the SNCC-organized Black Panther party in Lowndes County, Alabama, the Panthers opposed police brutality, called for black economic and political power, and advocated the formation of black self-help organizations to take control of ghetto neighborhoods. Imbued with the ideas of Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, the sociologist whose writings on the “cleansing” power of revolutionary violence exerted great influence on black militants, they also embraced armed self-defense. On 2 May 1967, thirty guncarrying Panthers marched into the California state capitol in Sacramento to protest a bill barring the carrying of firearms in public. The Panthers, with their anti-capitalist rhetoric and fierce opposition to the war in Vietnam, quickly became folk heroes to a generation of white radicals. But while the BPP did engage in serious community organizing, it also had a sinister, criminal side.108
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