Stokely Carmichael: “Black Power”

In October 29, 1966, Stokely Carmichael addressed an audience consisting primarily of college students at the open-air Greek Theater at the University of California at Berkeley in a speech that has become known as “Black Power.” This wasn’t the first time an audience heard “Black Power,” because Carmichael had used this terminology in other speeches that stressed the same theme. Carmichael was a leading spokesperson for the American civil rights movement as well as for international human rights and the relationship between the two movements. He had first become known as a representative of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, commonly pronounced “snick.” After breaking with SNCC in 1967, Carmichael became affiliated with the more militant Black Panther Party. Finally, after breaking with the Black Panthers, he spoke from his own platform during a period of self-imposed exile before his death in the Republic of Guinea. Carmichael touched on a broad range of issues in his “Black Power” speech, including SNCC’s condemnation of white America’s “institutional racism” (a term he has been credited with coining) and fear of the term “Black Power.” He also discussed the relationship between the American civil rights movement and unrest in much of the postcolonial world, the need for white activists to organize in white communities, nonviolence versus self-defense in the face of racial oppression, and the evil of the Vietnam War.