Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama!

Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama! by Lester, Julius. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780394171395.

In June of 1966, during James Merediths march on the highways of Mississippi, two words shouted by a SNCC organizer became imprinted on the American consciousness - Black Power. The term was new, Julius Lester points out, but the concept was old. As far back as 1829, David Walker, an ex-slave, had written in a widely circulated pamphlet: "Remember, Americans, that we must and shall be free and enlightened as you are. Will you wait until we shall, under God, obtain our liberty by the crushing arm of power?" Something else emerged from the Meredith march - a radical shift in emphasis and tactics within the civil rights movement. It soon became clear that the young black leaders in SNCC and CORE had lost faith not only in the efficacy of nonviolent methods but in the integrationist goals they had been pursuing. Integration would be meaningless, they felt, if the economic and political realities of life in the United States remained unchanged: black people, however, would be unable to change these realities if they remained powerless within their own communities. A time of consolidation had come, a time when black people had to act and speak for themselves rather than be helped or interpreted by their "white friends". There has been much outright condemnation of the Black Power position, and liberal critics have called it "spiritually bankrupt." Nonetheless, Julius Lester writes: "Black Power has become the microscope and telescope through which black people look at themselves and the world. It has enabled them to focus their energies on something while they prepare for the day of reckoning." Here, by a SNCC Field Secretary, is a fiery and forthright exegesis of Black Power - its meaning, its historical roots in the ideas of Frederick Douglass, Martin J. Delaney, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Du Bois, and the bitter criticism of American society that it embodies.