Stamped from the Beginning

The racist pronouncements of the Moynihan Report overshadow celebrations of the Voting Rights Act. Two days after the report is leaked, six days of race riots begin in Los Angeles. Davis, meanwhile, is en route to Frankfurt, Germany. Around the same time, the Race and Color Conference takes place in Copenhagen; there, scholars critically examine how phrases like “black sheep,” “blackmail,” and “blacklisting” with negation and harm. Other euphemisms that come to be associated with Black people around this time are the terms “minority” and “ghetto,” which have a similarly marginalizing effect. Kendi notes that the word “ghetto,” with its suggestions of neglect, poverty, and crime, is often lazily invoked to describe anywhere Black people live (regardless of their class) or even as an adjective that denotes Black culture.

A 1966 New York Times article contrasts all the negativity associated with Black people to the supposed “model minority” of Asian Americans. Meanwhile, a new group of activists focus on rejecting the negativity associated with Blackness, including Stokely Carmichael, a Trinidad-born, Brox-raised Howard University graduate who idolized Malcolm X. In 1966, Carmichael is serving as the chairman of the powerful Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and immersed in antiracist activism. During one rally, he ignites a chant of “BLACK POWER!” News of this demand quickly spreads around the country yet earns the condemnation of some Black leaders.

However, the movement keeps spreading, and by the end of 1966, a Black Power conference takes place at UC Berkeley. Two young Oakland residents, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, draft a 10-point platform for a new organization, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. In the platform, which demands autonomy and economic justice, they quote from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Reading about the Black Power movement from Frankfurt is frustrating for Davis, who decides to travel back and finish her Ph.D. at UC San Diego in order to be closer to the action. Her involvement with the movement begins with founding a Black Student’s Union at UCSD.

Black Power has an impact on King, who repeats one of its messages (that “black is beautiful”) during a speech in August 1967. By this point, assimilationists have lost patience with King, who is becoming too radical for them. He decides to focus on a Poor People’s Campaign aimed at securing an “economic bill of rights.” In Carmichael’s Black Power, coauthored with Charles Hamilton, the authors discuss the difference between “individual racism” and “institutional racism.” After three summers of Black-led protesting and rioting, President Lyndon Johnson promises to crack down on “rising crime and lawlessness.” By 1968, politicians of both parties being repeatedly promising to (re)institute “law and order.”

Another “disciple” of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, writes a devastating account of how the police enforce the existing white supremacist social hierarchy in his controversial and enormously popular book Soul on Ice. In the book, Cleaver dwells on damaged Black masculinity and openly admits to having committed rape. He is married to Kathleen Cleaver, the first woman to serve in the Black Panther’s Central Committee (as national communications secretary). He expresses passionate disdain for Black men who shun women of their own race and choose to date white women instead.

In 1968, the government’s Kerner Commission releases its report on the Black-led rebellions that have been occurring across the country. The report emphasizes that white society is responsible for creating the conditions that led to the uprisings, but that this message has been distorted by the racist media. It warns that the country is becoming more “separate” and “unequal.” While Richard Nixon condemns the report, King stresses its urgency and necessity. Lyndon Johnson commissions a second report (written by different individuals), which recommends increased funding for police.

Angela Davis is at the SNCC office in Los Angeles on April 4, 1968, when she learns that Martin Luther King has been killed. The night before his assassination, he had promised a “colored peoples”’ revolution. King’s death pushes countless Americans to support Black Power, assisted by James Brown’s hit single “Say It Loud—I’m Back and I’m Proud.” In schools and universities, activists demand the instigation of a Black Studies curriculum. Protests at educational institutions across the country lead to the creation of the first Black Studies departments. Countless non-Black allies join the fight against anti-Black racism, with non-Black people of color forming their own antiracist movements (such as Brown Power) that act in solidarity with Black people.

Both the SNCC and Black Panther Party are plagued by sexism. In 1968, Frances Beal helps found the Black Women’s Liberation Committee within the SNCC. Literature emerges about the dual oppression Black women face, analyzing the ways in which  white men, white women, and Black men oppress Black women. Tension over sexism is part of what leads the SNCC Los Angeles chapter to shut down in 1968. That same year, Davis joins the Communist Party and begins working on the campaign for the party’s presidential candidate, a Black woman named Charlene Mitchell.