Black Power emerged as a demand born of failed freedom struggles

Evidence

As the new chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Stokely Carmichael was one of the leaders of the Mississippi March Against Fear in the summer of 1966, alongside King and Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality. The massive march careened through Mississippi towns, battling segregationist resisters, mobilizing and organizing locals, and registering the latter to vote. On June 16, 1966, the March Against Fear stopped in Greenwood, Mississippi, one of the buckles of the belt of majority Black southern counties still ruled by armed Whites. “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothing,” Carmichael shouted at a Greenwood rally. “What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” “What do you want?” Carmichael screamed. “BLACK POWER!” the disempowered Greenville Blacks screamed back. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 996

Categorization

• QUESTION: Kendi frames the Black Power slogan as antiracist (opposed to Negro-assimilationism) — worth holding against the later critiques that Black Power itself carried forms of sexism and essentialism that antiracism would reject.
• XREF: connects to: Black nationalist self-help rhetoric surges when civil rights declines — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 244