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Civil Rights and Protests

Race Riots

What was the Black Power Movement?

The Black Power Movement of the mid 1960s was an outgrowth from the modern Civil Rights Movement. However, the failure of legal and political decisions, and the failure of the nonviolent movement for African-American equality and justice in the American South to bring about significant transformation, resulted in a more militant posture against the prevailing white system of belief, and the development of a distinctly African-American ideology known as Black Power. Although the phrase had been used by African-American writers and politicians for years, the expression gained currency in the civil rights vocabulary during the James Meredith March Against Fear in the summer of 1966. At that time, Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998; later Kwame Turé), head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), used the expression as a means to galvanize African Americans. While the movement essentially disappeared after 1970, the concept of positive racial identity remained embedded in the African-American consciousness.



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