Reevaluating the Black Power Movement – From Mayor Richard G Hatcher to President Barack Obama
Though misunderstood and misrepresented by the media and its opponents, the 1960s Black Power movement touched every aspect of American culture, and like the "New Negro" Movement of the 1920s, African Americans came of age, becoming self-determining and racially conscious. Black people- sharecroppers, unionists, welfare and tenants rights organizers, students, intellectuals, poets, musicians and singers and politicians-grounded in the ideology of Black Power, began to organize around controlling their own lives and institutions. The movement pointedly questioned the capacity of America's democracy to extend justice, citizenship and equality of opportunity to African Americans, castigating America for its failure to live up to the principles of democracy.
Unfortunately, the confrontational...