Black Power and the American People

Culture and Identity in the Twentieth Century

While the history of the Civil Rights Movement, from Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King, is one of the great American stories of the twentieth century, the related Black Power movement has left a more complex legacy. Its original leaders, Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks, were Black Nationalists, advocating a militant and extremist approach to tackle racism, while other leaders, such as Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers, believed that the struggle for Black Power was essentially a class struggle. Beginning with the folk-narratives told through song by slaves in the plantations, through the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s and 30s, the era of Malcolm X, the African-American art and fashion of the late sixties and 'soul music' and politics in the 1970s, Black Power and the American People will be the first comprehensive cultural history of the movement.