{"id":649,"date":"2014-05-31T23:28:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-31T23:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/05\/black-religion-and-black-power.html"},"modified":"2014-05-31T23:28:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-31T23:28:00","slug":"black-religion-and-black-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/05\/black-religion-and-black-power.html","title":{"rendered":"Black Religion and Black Power"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

When most people (and many scholars) think of American religion and struggles for social justice, they tend to think first of the southern civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. \u00a0And to a certain extent \u00a0they would be right to do so. \u00a0There is no question that the fight against segregation in the Jim Crow South represented a high point of religious activism in American history \u2013 and many of my fellow\u00a0<\/span>bloggers here<\/a>\u00a0have contributed to our understanding of this moment. (Religious labor radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s represented\u00a0<\/span>another high point<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0our bloggers have been attentive to.)<\/span><\/span>

<\/span><\/span>Today though, I want to turn our attention to another historical moment, one chronologically proximate but often imagined to be antithetical to the civil rights movement \u2013 namely, Black Power. \u00a0Black Power has typically been conceived as northern (and western) whereas civil rights was southern, violent while civil rights was nonviolent, and secular in contrast to the inherent religiousness of civil rights. \u00a0When Stokely Carmichael first spoke the words \u201cBlack Power!\u201d in 1966 (which, as an aside, he did in rural Mississippi\u00a0<\/span>not<\/i>\u00a0in the urban north) he gave voice to a growing shift in the predominant ideologies and strategies of the black freedom struggles, even if the component parts of Black Power (black nationalism, community control, self-defense) were not new.\u00a0<\/span>
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Later that same year two black college students in Oakland, California, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. \u00a0According to Robert L. Allen\u2019s classic\u00a0<\/span>Black Awakening in Capitalist America<\/i>(1969), the Black Panther Party Platform represented the \u201cfirst concrete attempt to spell out the meaning of black power,\u201d proposing a sweeping program that ranged from demands for employment and education to broader issues of freedom and self-determination.<\/span><\/span>

<\/span><\/span>Journalists were quick to contrast what they took to be the irrational rage of urban youth shouting \u201cBlack Power!\u201d with caricatures of a more palatable southern Christian nonviolence \u2013 needless to say, neither of these characterizations approximated the reality of either.\u00a0<\/span><\/span>

<\/span><\/span>Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When most people (and many scholars) think of American religion and struggles for social justice, they tend to think first of the southern civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. \u00a0And to a certain extent \u00a0they would be right to do so. \u00a0There is no question that the fight against segregation in the Jim […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBlack Religion and Black Power<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When most people (and many scholars) think of American religion and struggles for social justice, they tend to think first of the southern civil rights\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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