The Sherrod Black Power March 1963–1967: The First Black Leaders in the State of the Art and the Mississippi Delta, or What We Are Trying To Do About It
The Rev. Charles Sherrod, a quietly stalwart civil rights leader who helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960, became its first field secretary when he took an assignment in rural Albany, Ga., and remained there to create one of the country’s largest and most successful cooperative farms, died on Tuesday at his home there. He was an old man.
He was among the first Black leaders to grasp the importance of field work: moving into a community, building ties with local leaders and developing a broad-based coalition of teenagers, college students and church congregations to advance voting rights and desegregation.
In the summer of 1961, he arrived in Albany after a promising academic career. He was fresh off a monthlong stay in a South Carolina prison, where he and three others had been sentenced to hard labor after a lunch-counter sit-in. The four had refused bail, choosing instead to expose the cruelty of a system that punished Black people for the simple act of trying to buy a sandwich.
In the summer of 1966, America’s top civil rights leaders had descended on Mississippi for what became known as the Meredith March. They were travelling from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi to join a voting rights march that began three years earlier in homage to James Meredith, an African American activist who integrated the University of Mississippi. Meredith had been shot by a White supremacist and hospitalized with severe bullet wounds.
Some 500 marchers and local youth had gathered on the dusty baseball field for a nighttime rally, and as Carmichael climbed onto the back of a truck with generator-powered lights below, he looked as though he had stepped onto a floodlit stage. “We’ve been saying ‘Freedom Now’ for six years and we ain’t got nothing,” Carmichael shouted. We are going to start talking about Black Power now.
Black power! the crowd shouted back. “We want Black Power!” Carmichael cried again, five times in all. “Black Power!” the crowd screamed back each time.
On the next day, an Associated Press story was picked up by more than 200 newspapers. The black power movement was born overnight.
As if to prove the Panthers’ point, however, the summer of 1966 brought a series of clashes between police and urban Blacks that set off riots in Chicago, Atlanta and the San Francisco neighborhood of Hunters Point. The uprising’s became associated with the Black Power slogan and caused a drop in White support for the civil rights agenda. In a Newsweek poll, Whites suddenly opposed even nonviolent Black protest by more than two-to-one.
I believe that when people look at the Panther’s, they see an image ofNewton and Seale who have grown out their hair and afros. The people are wearing leather jackets and berets. A big part of their appeal is they just looked very cool, at least to a lot of young Blacks in those days, and still today. And so they stood for a political project, but also an expression of Black identity, vis à vis the way they dressed and the way they looked and the way they spoke. And I think because in some ways that has been the more enduring legacy of Black Power, the cultural part of it, I think people just think like, “God, the Panthers were so cool.” They were cool in more than one way. But I think because they’re romanticized in that way. I think people have not really focused and studied enough about the lessons of what they tried to achieve politically. I think this is an object lesson for the Black Lives Matter movement: [The Black Panthers] were correct in a lot of their original analysis, certainly about issues with the police. We are still living with that very much almost on a monthly basis here in this country, tragically, also about the limits of integration. They just took the way in which they dealt with it to an extreme that ultimately just became self-defeating.
When the panthers first wore their leather jackets and berets, they were trying to advertise a plan to use the open carry gun laws in California to create armed patrols to watch the Oakland police.
King tried to bring a peaceful approach to Chicago, but he was attacked by a White counter attack that was vicious and unlike anything he had seen in the South. Ronald Reagan was elected to the statehouse in California after a White backlash vote in 1966 and the rightward swing of that year set the stage for Richard Nixon to win the presidency.
An ultranationalist group within SNCC tried to remove all White members, but their bid was initially dismissed by the group’s leaders, who chose not to go along with it. After only one year on the job, the spent and less than charming H. Rap Brown took over from a spent and less than charming Edmund Carmichael, who had stepped down just a few months before.
Another vicious cycle consumed the Black Panthers. Winning release from prison in late 1966 with the backing of authors who admired the jailhouse essays he would publish in the book “Soul on Ice,” Eldridge Cleaver teamed up with Newton and Seale—then pushed the Panthers to depart from their focus on local police and embrace talk of armed revolution.
It’s important to be prepared for any backlash when there is a fleeting progress. A student of 1966 would have been surprised to see how rapidly the reform movement ended in the face of a campaign to vilify minorities and calls for police funding.
The civil rights movement’s language changed in 1966. There was also an “awakening of Black consciousness on a cultural level,” he says. “It was really the year when Afros took off, when people started wearing dashikis, where a lot of young Blacks said, ‘We don’t want to be called Negroes anymore.’”
There was also a notable shift away from integration, Whitaker says. Carmichael advocated for Black people to create their own political party and to elect their own officials. The drop in the group’s political clout can be attributed to him expelling the group’s white members. All of this, Whitaker says, laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement — including the election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California in 1966 and George Wallace’s presidential run in 1968.
“A big lesson of 1966 is, beware of the potential backlash,” Whitaker says. I was writing a book in the middle of a summer of marches. I can see why there is going to be hell to pay for what happened in 1966. There’s going to be a backlash to what looks like progress in 2020. Yes, that is what we are living with right now.
It is the first time that an African American has led a national news magazine. His previous books include Smoketown, My Long Trip Home and the 2014 biography Cosby, which was later widely criticized for not addressing multiple allegations that superstar comic Bill Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted women. ” I was wrong to not deal with the sexual assault charges against Cosby and pursue them more aggressively”, Whitaker admitted on his verified account.
What Dr. King and his family had to say about Black cosmology in the South and the early 1960s: a tribute to Dr. J. L. Carmichael
In terms of integration, what Stokely was saying about the South (vis à vis poor Blacks) and then later the Panthers were saying, even in the North (vis à vis urban Blacks in places like Oakland) … was that actually white people were not interested in integrating with poor Blacks in the South or in the North. The integration was done for middle class blacks to live side by side with white people who are also middle class in other ways, not necessarily with Black poor and Black underclass in the North.
The press characterized Carmichael as King’s archnemesis. But in fact, on a personal level, they got along quite well. Stokely had a lot of respect for Dr. King. Dr. King didn’t agree necessarily with all of Stokely’s rhetoric, but he admired the fact that he was an activist who had put his life on the line and going out to organize in the South. But there were both sort of differences that had to do with tactics and strategy, but also with background. So one of the things that was different about the Black Power leaders was some of them had come out of the South, but a lot of them came out of the North. They were children of the Great Migration. Their parents and grandparents had come north from the South. They had had educational opportunities that Blacks in the South didn’t necessarily have. He attended Howard University and the Bronx High School of Science in New York, both elite high schools. And they just didn’t have the sort of tradition of deference, frankly, that the older generation in the South had. They were less rooted in the church than the previous civil rights generation. They had a different attitude. They were impatient. They had seen how their parents’ dreams could not be fulfilled when they came north.
But the other effect was internal. John Lewis had always stood for the principle of SNCC being open to white membership. He had a lot of very close friends with some of the original white SNCC members. And so that to the degree that, as 1966 progressed and the whole issue of white participation loomed larger and larger, and it eventually led by the end of the year to the expulsion of the last remaining white members of SNCC, I think if John Lewis had been there, he would have fought that very aggressively. The door opened a lot more after he was gone.
In Watts, after the the Watts riots of 1965 in Los Angeles, there had been a group of local Black activists who had decided that they were going to ride around just looking out for situations where police, white police were interacting with the local Black population and just stand at a remove where the police could see them, but where they weren’t trying to interfere, but just to make their presence known. We’re watching this. So if anything gets out of hand, if the police in any way abuse their authority, we will be witnesses.”