History of the United States II / Unit 14 USH2 2009 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Black Power and Nonviolence
The idea
Whether Black Power broke with the nonviolent movement or continued it is the second closing question, and the anchor's own sequence suggests rupture. SNCC was founded in nineteen sixty on Ella Baker's participatory democracy, among students committed to nonviolence; by the middle of the decade its chairman, Stokely Carmichael, preached Black Power, and in nineteen sixty-six the Black Panthers organised in Oakland. The Yawp describes activists growing less conciliatory as frustration mounted with the slow pace of change, and the assassinations of King and Malcolm X fuelling disillusionment.
In practice
A decade that began with four students at a Woolworth's counter and ended with Panther chapters in dozens of cities.
Where people slip
The witnesses complicate the rupture. The Yawp says King and Malcolm X shared the general goal of ending racial discrimination and differed on how to reach it, as Washington and Du Bois had. The anchor traces Black Power's idea of separate institutions to Marcus Garvey in the nineteen twenties, older than the nonviolent movement itself, and it notes that the Black Pride slogan Black is beautiful was coined by the abolitionist John S. Rock in eighteen fifty-eight. And the Yawp says the movement's long goal of economic justice proved elusive, the same frustration that drove activists toward Black Power. Two misreadings sit on either side. The first sets the two against each other as good and bad; the shared goal, and Malcolm X's changing views, which the anchor notes, contradict it. The second erases the difference; the Yawp records Malcolm X advocating armed resistance where King held to nonviolence. The course's position: different strategies, a shared goal, and a movement that contained both.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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