Whether we turn to William Van Deburg’s New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975, Jeffrey Ogbar’s Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, Ashley Farmer’s Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, Judson Jeffries’ Black Power in the Belly of the Beast, Rhonda Williams’ Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century, or, of course, Peniel Joseph’s magisterial Waiting’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, it is evident that in the minds of many Americans, both Black and White, the Black Power Movement is synonymous with violence, “reverse racism,” or, even worse, “Black supremacy.”² How most Americans came to their conclusions about the Black Power Movement is something of a mystery, considering the fact that comprehensive studies of the movement have been few and far between. As we have witnessed with the recent news coverage of the Black Lives Matter Movement, the media is neither an adequate nor an objective interpreter of Black life, Black love, and Black quests for liberation. As the first major Black popular movement to emerge in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement is most often juxtaposed with the Civil Rights Movement and rarely engaged on its own terms. However, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate, the Black Power Movement was as dissimilar from, as it was similar to, the Civil Rights Movement. For instance, one of the most distinctive features of the Black Power Movement was its cultural arts offshoot movement, the Black Arts Movement. The core concept of the Black Arts Movement was the Black aesthetic, and this set of principles and criteria for creating Black art, both visual and performing art, influenced everything brought into, and emerging out of, the Black Power Movement.

Because most White Americans consider the 1963 March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the crowning achievements and concrete accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement, few have understood that for many African Americans by the mid-1960s the Civil Rights Movement was understood to be in its last stages as a viable vehicle for social, political, and economic change. Even though a great many folks hold the view that the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement are distinctly different movements, influenced by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” I believe that the latter movement is actually a logical extension of the former.³ In other words, the Black Power Movement undeniably built on the foundation laid by the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, it is possible to conceive of the Black Power Movement as the radical, more militant phase of the “long Civil Rights Movement.” Where Civil Rights moderates, especially Martin Luther King, frequently invoked the “founding fathers” of the United States, among other White intellectual authorities, Black Power militants drew inspiration and insights from a Pan-African pantheon that included Toussaint L’Ouverture, David Walker, Nat Turner, Henry Highland Garnet, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells, Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, Frantz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral, among others.⁴

In the American social imagination of the twenty-first century the Civil Rights Movement is understood to have been squarely situated in the South. Which is to say, most folk think of the movement as a Southern movement. Even though many believe that most of the “action” and major episodes of the Civil Rights Movement took place in the South, it is important to come to terms with the fact that what we now think of as the Civil Rights Movement has been heavily manufactured. The actual movement was as Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western as it was Southern, and each region developed distinct programs and practices to challenge racial segregation and bring about integration.⁵ As Hall reminds us, “remembrance is always a form of forgetting, and the dominant narrative of the Civil Rights Movement – distilled from history and memory, twisted by ideology and political contestation, and embedded in heritage tours, museums, public rituals, textbooks, and various artifacts of mass culture – distorts and suppresses as much as it reveals.”⁶ The roots of what could be called the “master narrative” of the Civil Rights Movement can be found in the back-and-forth between the movement’s members and the alleged objectivity of journalists and historians. In dramatic protest after protest, in rousing march after march, in sensational sit-in after sit-in, movement members articulated their demands employing Christian universalism and the discourse of democratic rights; demonstrated their awe-inspiring courage and commitment to freedom; and countered hate speech, fists, billy clubs, and guns with various forms of nonviolence, passive resistance, and civil disobedience.

Unfolding with more thrilling twists and turns than an Alfred Hitchcock, M. Night Shyamalan, or Jordan Peele film, key scenes of the Civil Rights Movement played themselves out in courtrooms and classrooms, churches and mosques, city streets and country roads, and the accumulation of each of these events eventually brought down America’s system of de jure segregation and disfranchisement. Undoubtedly, the mass media of the movement era made the marches and protests of the Civil Rights Movement among the most noted news stories of the 1950s and 1960s, but, bearing in mind the simple fact that the media is not objective, they only selectively reported on movement activities. Contingent on activists’ ability to offer up colorful, larger-than-life personalities and telegenic showdowns, typically ones where White wrongdoers unleashed racist violence on nonviolent Black protesters dressed in the finest fashions their meager money could buy, most journalists’ interest in the Civil Rights Movement waxed and waned. The Civil Rights Movement and the new medium of television emerged and evolved along parallel paths, and for one of the first times in American history White citizens could bear witness to the ways in which, even after more than 350 years of enslavement, African Americans continued to be mistreated. In many White Americans’ minds these images of racist violence seemed to arise from the ether, to come out of the blue, essentially to have no historical precedent. Sadly, this situation, this distortion of historical fact and favoring of historical fiction, was compounded when the national media’s mostly favorable, even if most often misleading, coverage of the Black Freedom Movement abruptly ended in the mid-1960s as the moderatism of the Civil Rights Movement gave way to the militantism of the Black Power Movement.⁷

Unambiguously turning a hostile eye toward the radicalization of the Civil Rights Movement and the emergence of the Black Power Movement, national news networks’ cameras quickly turned away from the South and in so doing ignored the ways in which the Southern movement continued to evolve after 1965 and set more radical social and political goals in line with many of the goals of the Black Power Movement. Frequently by over-relying on the national press’ coverage of both the end of the Civil Rights Movement and the beginning of the Black Power Movement, not only were the evolving objectives of the “long Civil Rights Movement” disregarded, but the continuities and similarities, the actual overlapping interregional agendas of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement, have been obfuscated. This has, obviously, created a narrative breach, a rupture in the historical narrative between, on the one side, what people conceive of as the Civil Rights Movement and, on the other side, the historically documented ways in which the Civil Rights Movement morphed into the Black Power Movement.⁸ In agreement with Hasan Kwame Jeffries, I firmly believe that it is important for us to challenge and replace “earlier arguments positing that the Civil Rights Movement ended in 1965 or 1968” with “the idea that Civil Rights struggles continued into the Black Power era.”⁹ In fact, Jeffries continued:

Interestingly, I have found both White folk and a great many Black folk who are willing to concede that rhythm & blues laid the foundation for, and eventually morphed into, soul music but who adamantly refuse to even entertain the idea that the Black Power Movement...