3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

with him when he was here ."~ 4 The spectacle of armed black men going to the polls wa:
not wasted on Carmichael, who began to think about the implications of power, and about
what this concept really meant .
When Carmichael and Willie Kicks introduced (or, more accurately, resunated)
the phrase "Black Power" at the 1966 Meredith March, they "touched a nerve in a very
nervous white America." is
Carmichael, who would later pionar SNCC's merger with the
Panthers in early 1968, tapped the same reservoir of white fear that Robert Williams and
the Deacons for Defense and Justice had tapped, though again, whites largely
misunderstood the concept of Black Power. For most blacks, the appeal of Black Power
lay in its excitement and energy, not its threat. Linda Bryant Hall, a young activist, noted
that Carmichael "came with the same kind of energy Malcolm X came with . That's what
we liked, not that we wanted to overthrow our government . . . and not that we wanted to
~4Jackson, interviewed by Wright, August 3,1968.
is As the Meredith March progressed, Kicks began to promote the slogan "Black
Power'; it was Carmichael's use of the phrase at a rally in the latter stages of the March
that electrified the media and popularized the phrase . As Clayborne Carson has pointed
out, "nicks provided Carmichael with a new weapon in his ideological swggle with King
when he demonstrated the enormous appeal of the slogan `Black Power'--a shortened
version of `black power for black people,' a phrase used by SNCC workers in Alabama."
"Black Power" had been used before as a political expression . Novelist Richard Wright
used "Black Power" as the title of his book on African politics written in the 1950s .
Black activist Paul Robeson spoke of black power during the 1950s, as did Harlem
political leaders Jesse Gray and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell even earlier. "But
combined with Kicks' infxtious contempt for Mississippi's white authorities," Manning
Marable has observed, "and in the context of the Meredith March, the slogan captuc+ed the
mood of the majority of CORE and SNCC activists and most rural blacks as well ."
Carson,~, 209; Manning Marable, Race. Reform and Rebellion (Jackson :
University Press of Mississippi,1984), 104 .
15 6