The call for black power touched the depths of my soul.
— Gwen Patton (1966)
1
“Hey Jim, I got an idea. I want to know what you think of it.” It was Willie Ricks,
the young SNCC fi eld secretary who had acquired a reputation as a brilliant orga-
nizer of young people in Birmingham, Americus, and other hot spots in the South.
He had stopped in the Atlanta offi ce on his way to Mississippi, and he had a question
for James Forman. The renewed Meredith March in June 1966 was underway and
Stokely Carmichael had asked Ricks to join him in Greenwood, Mississippi.
“Suppose when I get over there to Mississippi and I’m speaking, I start hollering for
‘Black Power’? What do you think of that?” Ricks asked. “Would you back me up?
You think it would scare people in SNCC?”
“ ‘Black Power’—sure, try it,” I told him. “Why not? After all, you’d only be shorten-
ing the phrase we are always using — power for poor black people. ‘Black power’ is
shorter and means the same thing. Go on, try it.”
2
SNCC’s executive secretary Ruby Doris Smith Robinson stood in the crowd on
the evening of June 16 in Broad Street Park where the marchers had received
“grudging permission from the city” to gather. John Lewis, James Forman, and
Willie Ricks were there too. It had been a long day of walking and organizing to
carry on the solo March Against Fear started by James Meredith—now hospital-
ized after being ambushed and shot by a would-be assassin.
3
The violent assault
on Meredith led SNCC members to re-evaluate his campaign, which they had
initially agreed to not participate in. They thought the idea of a March Against
Fear was “madness” and politically vague. But SNCCers eventually decided that
4
INTO THE PUBLIC’S EYE
128 Part II
their absence from a march that would pass through parts of Mississippi where
they had spent years organizing might be hard to explain to local people.
4
More-
over, the march could provide an opportunity to register more voters and thereby
demonstrate their will to control their destinies. So, they entered the fray. Indeed,
their presence would have dramatic impact.
June 16, like other days, would be long. Once night began to fall and orga-
nizers and marchers started arriving in Greenwood, they would need food and
rest. Part of the advance team, Carmichael and others started preparations at
the Stone Street Negro Elementary School. Although the school was in the
black community, white school board offi cials refused to allow marchers to use
the black school as a campground. Here—starkly and concretely—emerged the
issue of black community control, or the lack thereof. Not only had white
offi cials prevented black school offi cials and residents from using the public
facilities in their community as they wished, but white police showed up to
uphold that decision. Even in the face of white authority, Carmichael began
preparing the campground. That’s when the police commissioner arrested him
and two others.
5
Ricks, who had begun testing out the phrase “Black Power” in
the community, had supposedly advised Carmichael to let the police arrest him.
He then told Carmichael: “We’ll get you out of jail, and you come and make
the speech tonight.”
6
Tonight arrived at Broad Street Park where marchers, this time, successfully
erected tents. Impatience and excitement pervaded. Upon release from jail, Car-
michael made his way to the rally and to the podium. Ricks followed closely
behind: “Drop it now,” he advised SNCC’s sinewy chairman. “The people are
ready. Drop it now.”
7
The crowd roared. Carmichael avowed rapturously that he
would be arrested no more. He told black people to stop taking what white police
meted out and insisted that black police should be in charge. Then, he shouted,
“What we gonna start sayin’ now is ‘black power!’ ”
Ruby Doris Smith Robinson stood there and soaked it all in—the exaspera-
tion with the racial status quo and the pregnant desire for something better. Now,
for sure, was not the time to retreat. It was the time to renew one’s commitment.
Known for her seriousness, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson was already a six-year
movement veteran by her early twenties. As a teenager, Spelman College stu-
dent, and member of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, she attended
SNCC’s founding conference at Shaw University in 1960. She went to Rock Hill,
South Carolina, where she, at age 18, served 30 days in jail alongside fellow SNCC
activists Diane Nash, Charles Sherrod, and Charles Jones. Soon thereafter, she
joined the Freedom Rides, spending 45 days in the infamous Parchman Prison
in 1961. Back in Atlanta, her birthplace, Ruby Doris Smith joined protesters at
Grady Memorial Hospital to challenge its segregation policies in 1962. She helped
to build SNCC chapters in McComb, Mississippi; Charleston, South Carolina;
and Nashville, Tennessee. In 1964 she went door to door organizing and took
charge of the Sojourner Truth motor fl eet for SNCC’s summer voter registration
Into the Public’s Eye 129
campaign in McComb. That’s where she met her husband, Clifford Robinson,
who worked as a mechanic for the fl eet. They married that year, and in 1965, their
son Kenneth Toure was born.
On that day in Greenwood in 1966, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson’s commit-
ment to SNCC and against racial oppression radiated when she, alongside Forman,
Ricks, and hundreds of others in the crowd, followed Carmichael’s public lead
and chanted “Black Power.” In fact, the three SNCCers strategically positioned
themselves “directly behind a mass of people who were in front of news cameras
and joined in raising the cry of Black Power.”
8
She would remain opposed to
racial separatism, but she unapologetically believed in black consciousness and
racial solidarity. While Carmichael became Black Power’s publicly recognized
champion, the “hardworking, clear, and decisive” executive secretary continued
to dedicate herself to SNCC and a black-led liberation struggle by fi rmly manag-
ing the day-to-day organizational work—at least until her sickness and premature
death from cancer at age 25.
9
Black Power both scared and moved grassroots people and activists—veterans
and neophytes, known, not so known, and unknown. The cry resonated in a
society where white men such as Aubrey James Norvell felt empowered to load,
aim, and fi re a 16-gauge shotgun in order to kill a black man who walked across
Mississippi for the right for black people to exercise the vote without fear. The
cry resonated in a nation where the absence of power resulted in policies, practices,
and institutions that maintained, perpetuated, and expanded inequality. In Green-
wood, for instance, widespread hunger and poverty were endemic for African
Americans.
10
Gwen Patton remembers when the call came for Black Power. It was in the
midst of the escalation of the student movement at Tuskegee Institute in 1966. At
Tuskegee, where Patton had become the fi rst woman student body president, she
met Carmichael and Ricks, read Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Jomo
Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, and learned about South Africa’s anti-apartheid
struggle.
11
In 1965, she and other students had formed the Tuskegee Institute
Advancement League (TIAL), which supported desegregation and voter registra-
tion campaigns. Sammy Younge Jr., a 20-year-old Tuskegee Institute student and
U.S. Navy veteran, served as TIAL’s liaison to SNCC. Younge organized both on
campus and in the community. He pushed for Macon County offi cials to accept
a much needed surplus food program, struggled to secure expanded access to
low-rent housing for black residents, and spearheaded picketing campaigns at
the local A&P store to protest employment discrimination. The fi rst effort suc-
ceeded; the latter two failed. Recalled Patton, Younge raised “some very basic
questions that upset a lot of people in the community.” This included not just
white people, but also black middle-class people, whether business persons or
college offi cials.
12
Younge and the more militant members of TIAL also had supported SNCC’s
effort to help launch an independent black political party in Lowndes County
130 Part II
and later Macon County in Alabama. According to Patton, however, the major-
ity of TIAL members did not think starting such a political party was plausible
“because of the structure of the community. The bourgeois people and the poor
people didn’t have any unity.”
13
This tension existed in Younge. He struggled over
whether to pursue status and forgo the movement or stay engaged. In December
1965, he recommitted himself to his dungarees and the battle for grassroots power.
Shortly thereafter, in January 1966, a travesty occurred. One late evening, a white
Standard Oil gas station attendant shot the 21-year-old Younge in the back of the
head for trying to use the white restroom.
14
His murder distressed SNCC members, “precipitated” the issuance of their
fi rst offi cial anti-war statement, and gave rise to their now familiar chant, “Hell
No, We Won’t Go.”
15
Gloria House of SNCC drafted the statement, which began:
“The murder of Samuel Younge in Tuskegee, Alabama, is no different than the
murder of peasants in Vietnam, for both Younge and the Vietnamese sought—and
are seeking—to secure the rights guaranteed to them by law.”
16
The link made
between the Vietnam War and racism, as well as stateside and foreign aggression,
was a divisive issue among black Tuskegee students, but it made sense to many.
Patton, in fact, would help found SNCC’s National Black Anti-War and Anti-
Draft Union (NBAWADU). After all, what was the point of putting one’s life
on the line for a country that did not respect, or protect, that life on its own soil?
Patton believed that black people should no longer have to beg for access,
prove their humanity, or wait on the slow pace of change. Black people needed to
demand and gain power. Recalled Patton: “If we had had Black Power, my uncle
would be alive; my grandfather, an unbent businessman; my father, a prosperous
businessman and a city father in a predominantly black city; my mother, alive in
cancer remission with the best of rehabilitation treatment; and me, never to have
suffered the mental and emotional humiliation of being captive in a sanitarium.
Yes, Black Power was the answer.” While focusing on very “personal experiences,”
Patton indubitably raised the specter of systemic exclusions. In fact, her experi-
ences as a student as well as her family’s experiences exposed the limits of racial
liberalism premised on assimilation. Black Power called into question this Ameri-
can creed by pointing out the gap between the promise of individual opportunity
and the trenchant reality of structural inequality that still impacted the majority
of black people’s lives. These concrete reasons expressed why for many women
and men “the call for black power,” as Gwen Patton put it, “touched the depths
of [their] soul.”
17
What the quest for Black Power actually looked like in terms of strategy and
impact would proliferate in the days, months, and years ahead. Acolytes operated
along a continuum of self-determination that privileged race-based politics, pride,
autonomy, control, and even sovereignty. They took advantage of their newfound
access to the media to make visible and legible the tragic conditions of black
people living in a wealthy nation. In this intensifi ed phase of the black freedom
movement, some old organizations shifted their rhetoric and agendas and new
Into the Public’s Eye 131
organizations formed; at the same time activists held all-black conventions and ral-
lies, authored histories of black struggles, and developed black position papers and
manifestos. All unapologetically questioned the foundations of U.S. democracy as
they raised the battle cry of black people as oppressed, colonized, and poor in an
era rife with social movements and domestic and global wars. Indeed, between
1966 and 1968, the fi rst two years of the era of expansive Black Power politics, the
longings expressed over multiple generations, the nationalist and leftist visions of
post-World War II black liberation, and the acceleration of discontent opened up
pathways onto the public scene.
Black + Power = What?
Black Power gained public cache and celebrity quickly. That evening at the Green-
wood rally, black people had responded enthusiastically. This was likely not only
because SNCC fi eld organizer Willie Ricks (now Mukasa Dada) primed people
beforehand, but also because battles for equity and human dignity remained ever
pressing. Patton and many Black Power advocates and sympathizers really felt “the
revolution was just around the corner.”
18
While Black Power as a race-fi rst slogan resonated, it also evoked immediate
concern. Shortly after the Greenwood rally, King met with Carmichael, Floyd
McKissick (who took over CORE’s reins from James Farmer), and members of
their staffs in Yazoo City. Only men attended the meeting, at least from the infor-
mation at hand. Not even Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, who as SNCC’s executive
secretary handled “the real heavy lifting, day to day,” was present.
19
Like at the
March on Washington, primarily black men still manned the national gates of the
most recognized black freedom organizations. During the gathering at the Catho-
lic parish house, King expressed his concern: “For fi ve long hours, I pleaded with
the group to abandon the Black Power slogan.”
20
For, as he argued, “The words
‘black’ and ‘power’ together give the impression that we are talking about black
domination rather than black equality.”
21
For Black Power activists, however, achieving self-determination and con-
trol of political, social, and economic institutions required securing power. If
white people could not distinguish between the desires of black people to make
decisions controlling their institutions, communities, and lives versus the oppres-
sive exercise of white power that produced inequalities and undermined black
self-determination, this was not their problem. On June 19, just days after the
Greenwood rally, Carmichael appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation and explained
Black Power: “Where black people were the majority, as in Lowndes County, Ala-
bama, and other southern localities, they should be in political control. They should
organize, register to vote, and vote. If this did not work, then other tactics, including
violence, may be required.”
22
Black Power was not up for negotiation.
Nor was it a wholly new idea, even if it signaled a new phase of the free-
dom struggle that emerged out of specifi c political circumstances. Even King
132 Part II
acknowledged that the concept and phrase, Black Power, “had been used long
before by Richard Wright and others.” But in Greenwood, King noted what he
deemed a signal difference: “Greenwood turned out to be the arena for the birth
of the Black Power slogan in the civil rights movement,” as well as for its expan-
sion locally, nationally, and internationally.
23
The media coverage helped.
Almost overnight journalistic and popular discussions of Black Power prolifer-
ated. The media seemed simultaneously mesmerized and troubled by the phrase.
White and black detractors waxed critical, presenting the call as bombast, as a
black predilection to violence, and demagoguery, or at minimum undefi ned and
elusive. The black sociologist Nathan Hare would write in “How White Power
Whitewashes Black Power”: “The lexicographic confusion over the term ‘black
power’ is, then, but a whey-eyed conspiracy to defame it and its philosophy.”
24
In
some ways, these public debates echoed centuries-old efforts to de-legitimize black
militancy and radical thought. This included post-World War II black radicalism
which, in bridging “Negro power,” anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalist quests,
challenged the ideological underpinnings of U.S. national and global supremacy
and threatened consensus in the Cold War era. Indeed, by the mid-1960s, the
ethos that privileged individualism, democracy, markets, and paternalism was so
entrenched that some white liberals not only expressed surprise about black peo-
ple’s public cry for power, according to William Sales, but also felt “that there was
something basically unfair, unwarranted and un-American about Black Power
demands.”
25
Despite this critique of Black Power, the age-old search for racial and
ethnic power was unquestionably very American, and for black people genera-
tions in the offi ng.
For several years, SNCC members, in particular, had been organizing around
self-determination, motivated by racial pride, and seeking political power. CORE,
too, already had a focus on building black community power. In 1965 at its annual
convention, CORE argued that it could not depend on “cajoling political units
toward desired actions.” CORE’s members continued, “We must be in a position
of power, a position to change those political units.”
26
Less than a month after
Greenwood, on Independence Day in 1966, CORE offi cially adopted its Black
Power resolution.
27
While Black Power unsettled the white liberal establishment and white civil
rights activists, some of whom had committed years of their lives to the civil
rights struggle, not all white allies took offense. In Chicago, for instance, some
white radicals actually supported the mandate that white activists concentrate on
building an anti-racist agenda among poor and working-class white people. Peggy
Terry was a white Chicago resident and activist with JOIN (Jobs or Income
Now), an organization founded in Chicago by the Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) as part of its interracial Economic Research and Action Project
(ERAP) in 1963. She participated in Meredith’s renewed March Against Fear and
personally witnessed Carmichael exhort Black Power. Acknowledging that “she
had been witness to an incredible moment,” Terry, who migrated to Chicago from
Into the Public’s Eye 133
Appalachia and had organized with poor white and black activists in the Windy
City, remembered: “We reached a period in the civil rights movement when Black
people felt they weren’t being given the respect they should have and I agreed.”
Despite the vigorous debates circulating in the March Against Fear camps, Terry
stated: “There was never any rift in my mind or my heart. I just felt Black people
were doing what they should be doing.”
28
JOIN activist Mike James similarly responded without anathema or seeming
affront. James was a student who had spent a year organizing poor whites in Chi-
cago’s Uptown. He acknowledged the efforts of white radicals to do what Black
Power activists advised. “Given Black Power’s challenge to white activists to go
organize their own communities,” James maintained, “JOIN provides an example
to be emulated, for it is unfortunately one of the few attempts being made to
organize permanent bases of radical opposition among whites in general, and poor
whites in particular.”
29
Even when criticism saturated the airwaves and newsprint, white people did
not hold the monopoly. As suggested by Dr. King’s early response, black leaders
also expressed concerns. Bayard Rustin not only argued that “great passions are
involved in the debate over the idea of black power,” but also saw “its propaga-
tion” as “positively harmful.”
30
He and others worried that a turn to Black Power
jeopardized their efforts to garner white support for the black freedom strug-
