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

Conceptions of Black Power wet+e hazy at best, downright confusing at wor:t.m Clearly,
Black Power meant different things to different people. The press attached implications
of violence to the phrase. Many whites saw Black Power as the bastard child of hatred
and violence : a ploy to grab white power and resources and use them against whites.
Carmichael observed, "to most whites, Black Power seems to mean that the Mau Mau are
coming to the suburbs at night."21 But to him, Black Power entailed, at its most basic
level, self-defense :
From our viewpoint, rampaging white mobs and white nightriders must be made
to understand that their days of free head-whipping are over. Black people should
and must fight back . Nothing mo~+e quickly c+epels someone bent on destroying
you than the unequivocal message : "O.K ., fool, make your move, and nrn the
same risk I run-of dying."~~
2°Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton offered the most comprehensive
(though still cloudy) interpretation of Black Power in Black Power(1%7); unfortunately,
this book complicated what Black Power meant to the civil rights movement in the
United States by incorporating Third World nationalist movements and ideology, and by
defining Black Power in terms of international struggle . See Stokely Camuchael and
Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York :
Vintage Books, 1967) . Other helpful works, written at the time, include Robert L. Scott
and Wayne Brockriede, The Rhetoric of Black Power (New York: Harper and Row,
1%9) ; James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: The Seabury Press,
l%9) . For white perspectives, sa Charles E. Eager, White Reflections on Black Power
(Grand Rapids, Mich . : William B. Eerdmans, 1967) ; and Joseph C. Hough, Jr.,~~
Power and White Protestants : A Christian_ Response to the New Negro Pluralism
(L.ondon: Oxford University Press, 1%8) .
2~Carmichael, quoted in Sitkoff, S~aale for Black Equa~itv, 202 .
~Carmichael, Black Power, 52.
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