Black Power displaced King’s love-based nonviolence because love presumed a white conscience.

Evidence

King confronted the cries for black power emanating from the June 16, 1966, March Against Fear in Greenwood, Mississippi. Stokely Carmichael boldly declared at the march, “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested—and I ain’t going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and ain’t got nothing. What we gonna start saying now is black power!” Many young African Americans had grown impatient with King’s calls for nonviolent, direct action and his invocations of love in the face of white violence. Love presumed that white America had a moral conscience. Many doubted that. Power or the lack of power was at the center of black misery in this country, they maintained. What black folk needed was real political power to secure and protect their interests, not an idea of love dependent on the transformation of white people’s hearts. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 262

Categorization

• XREF: The Black Power critique of ‘love’ that presumes a white moral conscience echoes the same skepticism behind Glaude’s rejection of faith in the Democratic Party.