THE CALL OF THE PANTHERS

When a young black activist rose to speak at a Mississippi rally in June 1966, his words lit the touchpaper of a powerful new political force

- SPENCER MIZEN

It was 16 June 1966. A young activist named Stokely Carmichael walked out of jail, headed to a political rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, and stood at a podium. What he did next changed the course of US history. "We been saying freedom for six years and we ain't got nothin," Carmichael declared to an audience of around 1,500 people. "What we got to start saying now is Black Power! We want Black Power!"

With these words, Carmichael signalled the opening of a new chapter in the Civil Rights Movement. Since the early 1960s, the campaign for racial equality in the US had largely followed an integrationist, nonviolent pathway in which figures such as Martin Luther King Jr envisaged a future in which black and white Americans came together in one nation.

What Stokely Carmichael was advocating in June 1966 was different. He was calling for something more assertive, more combative, less emollient. He was issuing a rallying call for Black Power.

So what is Black Power? According to Ashley Farmer, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, at the movement's heart lies a thirst for autonomy and self-determination. "This means the right to decide for oneself or one's community how one should live; race pride - the idea that blackness is inherently beautiful; and self-defence both against harmful stereotypes, and against unwelcome intrusions into one's community," she says.

AN ALLURING IDEOLOGY

Carmichael wasn't the first activist to voice such aspirations. A thirst for black power had existed since Africans had been brought to America as slaves and had been propelled into the national conversation by Malcolm X, before his assassination in 1965. Yet it was only after Carmichael's speech that white Americans realised the extent of Black Power's popularity.