It is evident (hat we can be improved and elevated only just so fast and far as we shall improve and elevate ourselves.
—Negro Abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1848
AFTER the slogan "Black Power" was chanted on a Negro march through Mississippi in 1966, it came to signify a new spirit of defiance at one edge of the campaign for civil rights. Among whites and moderate Negro leaders alike, the concept inspired fears of a procession of hot summers, a raging Negro separatist movement—and perhaps in the end a costly showdown between black and white that might send U.S. race relations all the way back to the post-Reconstruction period. The new movement quickly developed its list of fanatical leaders: Stokeley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Ron Karenga and, in his special way, Cassius Clay. It fed largely on the despair and disaffection of the poor, the uneducated, the slum-bound Negro who had nothing to lose but his life.
As the months have gone by since Black Power burst thus violently onto the scene, there has been a slow, subtle but steady shift in the attitude of Negroes—even the moderate Negro leaders—who were desperately opposed to the violent and separatist nature of the new crusade. What has clearly developed from this change is a Black Power movement set on a more respectable base, which at its best is in the spirit of what Frederick Douglass was advocating more than a century ago. The most intelligent spokesmen for the new attitude think of it in terms of Black Consciousness—or, more completely, of Black Pride.
Like Irish Power
The attitude is producing a wave of Negro organizations and movements—on campuses, in professions, in local communities and also on state and national scales. All this can be rather grandly described as a case of the Negro's looking to himself for salvation—and there discovering strengths that he never knew he possessed. There is indeed evidence that black pride is nourishing the new Negro's determination to take over his own destiny and accept no definition of blackness but his own. This kind of Negro is not antiwhite; he is pro-black. As one direct consequence of his attitude, America's most visible minority is more visible than ever. It is projecting a positive new image that makes more sense, even to Negro frustrations, than the shadow of violence falling on ghetto streets.