Stamped from the Beginning

Stamped from the Beginning

by

Ibram X. Kendi

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Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 31: Black Power Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
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.
Again, Kendi provides crucial context here about terms and ideas that are still active in contemporary culture. Crucially, the reason why so many euphemisms come into play during this time is because of the switch Kendi has described from overt segregationist to covert assimilationist racism. It is no longer acceptable to describe Black people and communities in the way that segregationists did early in the 20th century and before. But as Kendi points out, although the language has changed, the substance of the ideas remains fundamentally similar.
Themes
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Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists  Theme Icon
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge Theme Icon
The Invention of Blackness and Whiteness Theme Icon
The Illogic of Racism Theme Icon
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.
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee is one of the most important organizations within the civil rights movement and the radical movements of the 1960s in general. It is within this climate of exuberant youthful radicalism that Stokely Carmichael escalates the demands of Black activism, shifting from a discourse of “rights” to one of “power.”
Themes
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Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists  Theme Icon
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge Theme Icon
The Invention of Blackness and Whiteness Theme Icon
The Illogic of Racism Theme Icon
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.
In the contemporary moment, there is renewed interest in the Black Panther Party, triggered in part by books and movies about the era and by an adoption of the aesthetics of the Panthers. But what many people might miss—and Kendi carefully points out here—is the extent to which economic justice is at the heart of the Panthers’ platform. 
Themes
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Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists  Theme Icon
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge Theme Icon
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.”
Just as Malcolm X’s reputation as the “Apostle of Hate” does not match up to the reality of his life and work, King’s reputation as a nonviolent, rights-focused peacemaker also misconstrues the reality of what he thinks. Particularly toward the end of his life, King becomes increasingly focused on economic justice and increasingly impatient with assimilationists and racist white people in general. Yet this side of his thinking is rarely emphasized in popular recollections of him. 
Themes
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Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists  Theme Icon
The Invention of Blackness and Whiteness Theme Icon
The Illogic of Racism Theme Icon
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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.
Eldridge Cleaver is a complicated figure with a controversial legacy. Kendi highlights how Cleaver’s contributions to the Black Power movement are significant but also doesn’t gloss over his derogatory attitude toward women, which jeopardizes his antiracism.
Themes
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Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists  Theme Icon
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge Theme Icon
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.
After many examples of how the government and academic researchers collaborate to produce racist research, this passage contains an example of the opposite phenomenon. Without intending to, the government accidentally commissions a piece of antiracist research. It is extremely telling, Kendi notes, that the reaction to this report is to suppress it and attempt to rewrite its conclusions via a second report.
Themes
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Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists  Theme Icon
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge Theme Icon
The Illogic of Racism Theme Icon
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.
Martin Luther King’s assassination is a prime demonstration of a claim made by the Black Panther Fred Hampton (who is himself killed by the police in 1969 at the age of only 21): “You can kill the revolutionary, but you can never kill the revolution.” Kendi points out that while King’s assassination is an act of injustice, the result is that it attracts even more people to the Black Power movement, radicalizing them into refusing to accept meagre compromises and the excuses of white racists.
Themes
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Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists  Theme Icon
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge Theme Icon
The Invention of Blackness and Whiteness Theme Icon
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.
Kendi shows that while the sexism that plagues the Black Power movement weakens its strength, it also helps birth a new wave of thought and activism: Black feminism. Of course, there were Black feminists long before the 1960s, many of whom—such as Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Zora Neale Hurston—are mentioned in this book. Yet in the 1960s the movement begins to be formally consolidated.
Themes
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