Gr12 Black Power Movement PDF

Case Study 2 CASE STUDY: The Black Power Movement Key question: Why did the Black Power Movement emerge in the USA and what were its short- and long-term gains? Reasons for the Black Power Movement The Black Power Movement in the USA was established during the civil rights era in the 1960s. WHY? You...

Case Study 2 CASE STUDY: The Black Power Movement Key question: Why did the Black Power Movement emerge in the USA and what were its short- and long-term gains? Reasons for the Black Power Movement The Black Power Movement in the USA was established during the civil rights era in the 1960s. WHY? Younger members of the SNCC became more militant and outspoken, and thought that Kings non-violent approach was not achieving social change fast enough. The Black Power Movement emphasised black pride and called for the founding of black political and cultural institutions. Violence as a legitimate means of achieving civil rights was in conflict with the mainstream Civil Rights Movement and the two were regarded as antagonistic towards each other. However, there were groups and individuals who participated in both BECAUSE the political goals expressed by the Black Power Movement were the same as the non-violent Civil Rights Movement. Black Panther Party The Black Panther Party was formed in 1966 and played a short but important part in the Civil Rights Movement. It was formed to protect local communities from police brutality. They wanted equality in education, housing, employment and civil rights and stated how they would achieve this in their 10-point plan. They called for: Freedom Full employment Decent housing Teaching the true history of African-American people End to police brutality End to the murder of African-Americans Free health care. They called for: a revolutionary war to achieve these goals, and were willing to use violence to get what they wanted. © Via Afrika Publishers » History 12 Study Guide eBook 67 Case study Unit XX 2 Community programmes The socialist community programmes played an important part in the Panther’s strategy. They showed how politics was relevant to the people and how they cared about the needs of their communities. The first programme was The Free Breakfast for Children Program. They approached businessmen for donations and boycotted stores that refused to contribute. They served food to the children in church halls They also ran medical clinics. The programmes achieved a lot with very few resources. Militancy The other side of the Panther Program was militancy. 68 They chose to take up their constitutional right and carry arms. If they saw an officer stop an African-American they would go over and watch with their guns on full display. As long as they stayed a reasonable distance away the police could not do anything. They were not looking for shoot-outs and would only use their guns in self-defence. The guns had a big psychological effect as African-Americans felt empowered and the police felt fear. The activities of the Black Panther Party came to the attention of the racist and white supremacist head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover. In 1967 the FBI set up a counter-intelligence programme called COINTELPRO. Its aim was to disrupt and neutralise organisations the FBI regarded as ‘black nationalist hate groups’. COINTELPRO targeted the Black Panthers → involved assassinations, psychological attacks, instigating and fostering mistrust = setting AfricanAmerican groups against each other. The campaign destroyed the Black Panther, and Stokely Carmichael went into exile from 1971. The Black Panthers focused on socialist community programmes and free medical clinics. COINTELPRO was disbanded in 1971. © Via Afrika Publishers » History 12 Study Guide eBook Case study Unit XX 2 The role of BLACK POWER leaders Stokely Carmichael Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks were organisers within the SNCC and the first to use the term Black Power. Carmichael had taken part in the non-violent campaigns and spent 49 days in prison for being a Freedom Rider. He became chairman of the SNCC in 1966. In 1966 James Meredith started to march from Memphis to Jackson in a March Against Fear. Soon after he set out, a white sniper shot him in the back. King and Carmichael decided to continue the march in his honour but Carmichael was arrested in Greenwood, his 27th time being arrested. On his release, he made a Black Power speech, calling for all AfricanAmericans to unite and build a sense of community. He called on African-Americans to form their own organisations and adopted the slogan ‘Black is Beautiful’ and promoted ‘Black pride’. It was from this point that Carmichael began to criticise King and his nonviolent ideology and joined the Black Panther Party. He was elected ‘honorary prime minister’ of the party. Malcolm X Malcolm X was a militant revolutionary, whilst also being an outstanding role model, and sought to bring about positive social services. The Black Panther Party aimed to follow both these paths. Malcolm X firmly believed in self-defence whenever African-Americans were unjustly or unlawfully attacked. It was the Black Panther’s emphasis on self-defence that inspired a generation of militants. After leaving prison, Malcolm X became the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) spokesman, an organisation he had joined whilst in prison. Whilst he rejected King’s non-violent approach, he respected him as a leader. In 1964 he made a pilgrimage to Mecca and returned to follow a course similar to King’s – combining religious leadership and political action. Malcolm X was a socialist and the Panthers followed his belief of working-class unity across race and gender. The Panthers therefore argued for international working-class unity and supported joint action with white revolutionary groups. They eventually developed into a Marxist revolutionary group. © Via Afrika Publishers » History 12 Study Guide eBook 69 Case study Unit XX 2 Short-term and long-term gains of Black Power 70 Black Power declined very quickly in the late 1960s, as it had little money to support itself and because the government preferred King’s peaceful methods. Therefore, it seemed as if Black Power had achieved very little for black people and was a factor in the ending of the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. They did however achieve something for black people as a whole: they tried to help people in the inner-city ghettos they increased pride and a sense of black nationalism. Malcolm X was important in raising the morale of many African-American people and became a hero to many young African-Americans in USA and the world. © Via Afrika Publishers » History 12 Study Guide eBook Topic Unit XX 3 Summary and questions Summary In Topic 3, your historical enquiry focused on answering the following key question: Key question: What forms of civil society protest emerged from the 1960s to 1990? In order to answer this key question, you studied the concepts outlined below. Unit 1 Overview of civil society protests During the 1960s and 1970s there was an upwelling of civil rights movements across the world, as the promises of greater equality and democracy that the end of World War II promised to deliver did not materialise. These took the form of women’s liberation and feminist movements, peace movements, student movements, anti-war movements and civil rights movements. Case study 1 The US Civil Rights Movement The US Civil Rights Movement had its origins in the US Civil War that left the American South defeated, but still deeply racist and segregationist, with its Jim Crow Laws and white supremacist organisations like the Ku Klux Klan. Although there were a number of legal attempts (some of which were successful) to advance the cause of civil rights for African-Americans, the US Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s was mainly a massbased protest movement involving non-violent protests, civil disobedience campaigns, demonstrations and marches. Martin Luther King Junior played a central role in much of the US Civil Rights Movement after the Montgomery Bus Boycotts (1956) until his assassination in 1968. Key events in the US Civil Rights Movement that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 included sit-ins (e.g. the Greensboro sit-in), marches (e.g. to Lincoln Memorial and Selma-Montgomery) and campaigns (e.g. Freedom Rides, Birmingham and Little Rock, Arkansas, school desegregation). Case study 2 The Black Power Movement Amongst the African-American youth, there was impatience with Martin Luther King Junior’s non-violent approach to fighting for civil rights. People like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, the Black Power Movement and the Black Panther Party felt that change was happening too slowly and was too limited. They also espoused total black liberation and rejected any form of assimilation of African-Americans into mainstream, white, Western American culture. As a result, the Black Power Movement was militant, which, while gaining them some approval among African-American communities, alienated most people in the USA. Consequently, the Black Panther Party disbanded in 1982. © Via Afrika Publishers » History 12 Study Guide eBook 71