1966: The Year Black Power Redefined Civil Rights

PAULA NEWTON, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: And now, to the Black Power movement and the year that redefined America’s fight for civil rights. In 1966, journalist and critically acclaimed author Mark Whitaker explores that momentous year and the people who shaped it in his new book, “Saying It Loud”. He joins Walter Isaacson to explain how Black Power challenge the civil rights movement.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Mark Whitaker, welcome to the show.

MARK WHITAKER, AUTHOR, “SAYING IT LOUD”: Walter, it’s so great to see you. Thanks for having me.

ISAACSON: Yes, your new book, “Saying it Loud”, about the rise of the Black Power movement, the Black Panthers, has this amazing central character, of course, Stokely Carmichael. Tell me about him and how he became a charismatic leader.

WHITAKER: Well, Stokely Carmichael, he was born in the Caribbean. He was raised in New York, he went to Howard University, became involved with activism there. He had been a — an organizer in the deep south, registering blacks to vote in Mississippi and then in Alabama. And then in early — in the spring of 1966, at a retreat, a SNCC retreat outside of Tennessee where John Lewis, who had been the chairman of the SNCC was expecting to be easily re-elected to get —

ISAACSON: We’re talking about the student on violent coordinating committee, which was rising then from 1965 onward as a civil rights group.

WHITAKER: Right, exactly. Formed by young people who had, you know, come out of the sit-in movement in the south in the early ’60s. And John Lewis, you know, who is a national figure at this point, after being beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the Selma March, arrives at this retreat expecting to be re-elected. And is on the first ballot, on the first vote, but then a re-vote is demanded and this — there’s this wild scene, which is a whole chapter of my book, of this night long meeting and increasingly heated vote that — and discussion that goes until dawn. And then, finally, in the second vote, Stokely Carmichael is elected the new chairman. Representing a more militant message. It crushed John Lewis and it put Stokely, all of a sudden, who was not really a very well-known figure at that time on the national map.

ISAACSON: You’re talking about this meeting in Tennessee, in New Kingston. What was the philosophical difference between Stokely Carmichael and then John Lewis?

WHITAKER: Well, you know, John Lewis was very close to Dr. King and supported his whole, sort of, vision of integration and tactics of non- violence. He also, you know, had been invited to, you know, meet with President Johnson. And so, there was this more militant faction within SNCC by 1966 that was questioning all of that. And also, a thought that John Lewis was sort of out of touch with it all. And, you know, Stokely was — stood for a couple of things. One was, you know, questioning whether the whole vision and agenda of integration really, you know, was working. And also, whether blacks should be necessarily always committed unconditionally to non-violence. That black folks — poor black folks in the south than in the urban north, when confronted with violence, perhaps should have the right to defend themselves.

ISAACSON: You talk about nonviolence. So, let me read a great sentence from your book which goes right to the heart of that. It’s Stokely Carmichael saying of Dr. Martin Luther King, he made only one fallacious assumption. In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience. The United States does not have a conscience. That seems to be an amazing difference between Dr. King and Stokely Carmichael.

WHITAKER: Yes, and look, the leaders that emerged in the Black Power movement in 1966, there — in the south, you have this new leadership within SNCC. They had spent the previous four or five years organizing voters, black voters, to vote. In deep, you know, Alabama, Mississippi, places where the Ku Klux Klan operated with impunity. Where even the police, you know, were incredibly violent towards black communities. Where black folks had shotguns to protect themselves. So, their attitude was like, we can’t go into places like that and expect blacks to put down their arms and not defend themselves. Meanwhile, the — Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland later that year, they were dealing with, you know, the violence of the white police in their neighborhood. And when you think about, you know, what we’re still living with today, the idea that black folks, you know, didn’t have a right, somehow, to defend themselves, or, you know protect themselves against police violence, also was something that, you know, was not at all unreasonable.

ISAACSON: That’s what the Black Panther Party’s original name was about, right?

WHITAKER: The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. And they had actually taken that symbol, it’s an interesting story because the original by Black Panther Party had been founded by Stokely Carmichael or at least he helped organize it in rural Alabama, in a place called Lowndes County. Where he had, not only organized blacks who vote, but it actually gotten them to form their own political party. And they, adopted as a symbol for — to be recognized by people at the polls who couldn’t necessarily read a Black Panther. And later that year, that symbol was adopted by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. And again, they had a 10-point program. A lot of, sort of, demands that were perhaps impractical. But their main agenda and their main program was this idea of civilian patrols that would go around Oakland, keeping an eye on the police. And because California had open carry gun laws, at the time, that they would be armed. Not necessarily to confront the police but just to keep an eye on them.

ISAACSON: Stokely Carmichael uses the phrase Black Power, I think in a speech early in 1966, maybe in Greenwood, Mississippi. Tell me, did he really popularize that phrase? And what did he mean by it? Where did it come from?

WHITAKER: Well, you know, actually, the real credit for just coming up with the slogan and encouraging Stokely to use it goes to another SNCC organizer named Willie Ricks, and I tell his story in the book. But you know, it’s interesting because as soon — you know, it just — there was just something about that slogan that was catnip to the press. So, as soon as the story started, you know — it was reported that Stokely had used to this phrase, all of a sudden, these stories were picked up by papers around the country. He was booked a few days later on “Face the Nation”. And the white press was very intrigued, but immediately assumed the worst. That it meant — it was meant — the rejection of nonviolence. It meant it was anti-white. In fact, what Stokely was talking about at the beginning was what he had done in Lowndes County, which was this idea of don’t just register to vote but use your voting now power to elect black officials. It wasn’t at all a crazy or radical idea. But as I show at several points during the book — — when given an opportunity to explain what Black Power was to white audiences on shows like “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press” and later in a primetime special interviewed by Mike Wallace, Stokely, who was very charismatic, but could also be sort of provocative, did not really take the opportunity. And as a result, you know, I think the slogan was badly misunderstood by a lot of people.

ISAACSON: This notion though of pushing Black Power, I think you say in the book that it was the most dramatic shift in the long struggle for racial justice in America since the dawn of the modern civil rights movement. What was the shift?

WHITAKER: It was questioning the goal of integration, you know, which everybody associates with Dr. King in the “I Have a Dream” speech. And essentially, what Stokely and this, you know, the younger generation was saying was, you know what, when people talk about integration, you know, it’s really middle-class black folks talking to enlightened middle-class whites about whether they could integrate. But the evidence that they had seen in places like Lowndes County, Alabama, and in places like Oakland, California, where the Panthers were started was that white folks had no interest in integrating with poor blacks in the south. No interest in integrating with folks in the inner city. When Dr. King tried to take the civil rights movement to Chicago in 1966, he found that the white residents of Chicago had no interest in having blacks move into their neighborhoods. So, it was really a question of, how do we move forward trying to kind of person an agenda of racial justice in the absence of integration?

ISAACSON: So, tell me more about the white backlash that happens in 1966.

WHITAKER: I had not realized what a turning point 1966 was in American political history. I mean, again, we all think of 1968 and the election of Richard Nixon and the Democratic Convention. But it was really in 1966 that the republican party starts to rebound. Ronald Reagan was elected governor in California, the Republicans in the midterms picked up a bunch of seats in the House, State Houses. And it’s largely on the strength of white backlash against what was happening in the civil rights movement. You know, there was — there were more — there were race riots in 1966, as there had been a 1965 in Watts. But also, you know, just — within a matter of months, you see this new slogan of Black Power just scaring white people, changing the poll numbers on racial attitudes, and then leading to this huge rebound by the Republican Party in the midterm elections, which also is a moment when Richard Nixon starts thinking about, well, maybe I could have another shot at running for president.

ISAACSON: In your book, you talk about the unrest in 1965, and then the Black Power movement and that slogan in 1966 causing a white backlash. To what extent do you see echoes of that in the backlash against the Black Lives Matter and some of the unrest we’ve seen recently?

WHITAKER: I see very strong echoes, you know. And it’s interesting because I was in the middle of writing this book in the summer of 2020 when you had this, you know, very moving and historic Black Lives Matter response to the murder of George Floyd. And we’ve had people on the streets, both black and white, across the country and around the world, and everybody was talking about this moment of racial reckoning and things are really different this time. And I was thinking, you know what, I don’t know if this is going to last. If you look at the lessons of 1966, this could be followed by very strong pushback very quickly. And indeed, that’s what we see just a couple years later. I mean, you look at what’s happening with, you know, obviously — you know, a lot of voter suppression efforts around the country, particularly right now. This whole attack on black studies led by Governor DeSantis in Florida. And that’s where the discussion is now. It’s, you know, it’s entirely reminiscent of what happened in 1966.

ISAACSON: Your father was actually one of the pioneers of black studies, a professor at Princeton, if I remember correctly.

WHITAKER: Yes, the first head of African American studies at Princeton.

ISAACSON: And the notion of African American studies and black history was not done for the purposes that you see people accusing it of now, especially Governor DeSantis in Florida. Explain how that changed.

WHITAKER: I mean, If you listen to Ron DeSantis, you would think that the whole purpose of black studies was to make white — young white people understand the history of white supremacy and feel badly about their privilege. That wasn’t at all the original idea of the original advocates of black studies. When black students on campuses around the country in the — in — starting in 1966 and over the subsequent years were marching, protesting, demanding black studies, it was really for their own edification. They thought that they didn’t know black history well enough. And honestly, you know, when I look at it today, I — you know, the idea that in the, sort of, multicultural world that we live in today, that you’re going to tell young people that they have to study just one version of history, this kind of, you know, old-fashioned, which was mostly about the achievements of powerful white man. You know, of course that’s not the only, you know, kind of history they should learn. So, you know, there’s also a sort of citizenship component to it that really proponents of black studies were saying, look, you know, we want to be Americans. We want to stay here. We don’t want — you know, we’re not going to, you know, take up arms and try to overthrow the government. But we feel like, you know, just to accept our position and our future as American citizens we have a right to understand the role that we have played in the journey and historical journey of America and so forth.

ISAACSON: You talk about the Black Power movement shifting the politics of the civil rights movement. But it also, in 1966, in your book, I noticed changes black culture. I mean, the whole notion of everything from music to literature, whatever, is that still resonant today?

WHITAKER: I think it’s very resonant. I mean, in some ways, you know, we talked about how we’re still fighting a lot of the same fights and a lot of the problems that gave rise to Black Power are still with us, and that is absolutely true. I actually think that it’s, in some ways, the cultural legacy is the one that, you know, really changed for good and is — you know, has really been irreversible. But also saying, look, you know, we can, you know, have aspirations for education professionally, for achievement of different sorts, but we don’t have to hide our blackness in the process. We don’t have to process our hair. We can wear dashikis. We don’t have to dress like the white people. We can have our own, you know, culture and — that doesn’t just emulate white culture. When you think about the transition, for example, from Motown and R&B where black folks — I mean, it’s great music, but they’re all dressing and straightening their hair and trying to sort of, you know, look white in some ways. And, you know, the transition to hip-hop and so forth. So — and again, it was partly, I think, this realization that America was not moving, you know, very quickly towards being a truly integrated society. So, how are black folks going to think of themselves and live and move ahead side by side with whites but within the absence of true and total integration? I think that aspect of Black Power is something — it was revolutionary and it changed forever and I think that’s, in some ways, you know, perhaps the most positive outcome of this radical shift in that year of 1966.

ISAACSON: Mark Whitaker, thank you so much for joining us.

WHITAKER: Thank you, Walter. That was a pleasure.