Entry · catalog no. 1232
Black Power
/ /ˌblæk ˈpaʊər/ /BLAK POW-er
phrase · Greenwood, Mississippi for the flashpoint; Lowndes County, Alabama for the organizing; Oakland and Harlem for the institutions · 1960s
✓ Verified
1.
A political program of self-determination: Black-controlled voting blocs, businesses, schools, defense, and leadership, advanced as the successor to integrationist civil rights strategy.
“They ran their own slate in the county. That was Black Power in practice, not on a poster.”
2.
More broadly, a stance of racial pride, self-definition, and refusal to seek white approval, expressed in dress, hair, art, and language.
“Afros, African names, the raised fist — the whole style came up under Black Power.”
Origin & Attribution
The phrase entered American political speech through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the June 1966 March Against Fear in Mississippi, continued after James Meredith was shot. SNCC field organizer Willie Ricks, later Mukasa Dada, had been working the crowds with the chant and pressed the newly elected SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael to use it. Carmichael did, at a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi on the night of 16 June 1966, and the phrase went national overnight. Credit is routinely given to Carmichael alone, which flattens out Ricks's role and the Lowndes County, Alabama organizing that preceded it. The words themselves were older: Richard Wright used Black Power as the title of his 1954 book on Ghanaian decolonization, and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. spoke of Black power at Howard University in May 1966, weeks before Greenwood.
1966
Stokely Carmichael takes up Willie Ricks's chant at a Greenwood, Mississippi rally on 16 June and Black Power becomes a national slogan
1967
Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton publish Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, giving the slogan a book-length program
1968
James Brown releases Say It Loud — I am Black and I am Proud, which becomes the movement's unofficial anthem
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Greenwood, Mississippi for the flashpoint; Lowndes County, Alabama for the organizing; Oakland and Harlem for the institutions · 1960s
Spoken by
SNCC organizers, the Black Panther Party, student and campus movements, Black artists and musicians; later absorbed into general Black American usage
$BLACKPThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical72 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
88/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1954
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, New York: Random House, 1967
book
■
Stokely Carmichael, Black Power address, Greenwood, Mississippi, 16 June 1966, documented by the SNCC Digital Gateway and the Mississippi historical marker
speech
■
Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, 1954
book
■
+ Cite a sourceJames Brown, Say It Loud — I am Black and I am Proud, King Records, released August 1968
song
See also