In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea by Danny Goldberg

Author:Danny Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: music, history
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2017-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

Stokely Carmichael

Malcolm X’s influence grew even greater after his death. Not long before he was killed, he had said that blacks shouldn’t let whites into their organizations because regardless of how noble the intent, eventually whites would get a disproportionate amount of control through the influence of money. In January 1966, Floyd McKissick replaced James Farmer as executive director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the organization changed from an interracial, integrationist, nonviolent civil rights group into one embodying a secular version of Malcom’s philosophy. This dynamic also took hold at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had been formed in 1960 and quickly became one of the most effective grassroots organizations in the South. By 1967, whites had been expelled from most of its chapters and boards, and the charismatic twenty-five-year-old Stokely Carmichael had been elected president, replacing John Lewis—the last president of the organization who believed in nonviolence.

Carmichael had graduated from Howard University as a philosophy major, but inspired by the civil rights movement, he went south and led voter registration efforts for SNCC in Lowndes County, Alabama. He was arrested dozens of times and was horrified by the cruel brutality of the white Southern cops. (He served forty-nine days at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm prison.)

The first thing Carmichael did in his new role was to withdraw SNCC from an upcoming White House Conference on Civil Rights. He wanted to immediately differentiate the new iteration of SNCC from its past, and shortly thereafter he found an ideal rhetorical way to do so with the slogan “Black Power,” which was also the name of a book that Carmichael would coauthor in 1967. The phrase had appeared in Richard Wright’s 1954 book of the same name and had recently been adapted by SNCC’s Willie Ricks. However, it was Carmichael who injected “Black Power” into the national conversation in a widely covered speech in Greenwood, Mississippi, following the March Against Fear, at which civil rights hero James Meredith had been shot. Carmichael, who had the looks of a movie star, was a mesmerizing speaker: “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain’t going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!”

In the summer of 1966, Carmichael was one of the first black leaders to oppose the war in Vietnam, and in a speech at Berkeley, he popularized the chant, “Hell no, we won’t go!” And it was Carmichael who first said, “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

Because of his affinity for the mass media, some in the movement mocked him as “Starmichael,” but it was that media savvy that took radical views into the living rooms of Middle America. On the CBS news show Face the Nation, Carmichael, dressed in a conservative suit and tie, flashed a Dennis the Menace smile as he calmly refused to rule out violence if injustice to African Americans persisted.

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