Black Power, the Panthers and the 1968 Olympics
From SNCC to ‘Black Power’, 1966
By 1966 the patience that had carried the early civil rights movement was running thin among younger Black activists. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had ended legal segregation in the South, but they had not touched ghetto poverty in Northern cities, racist policing, or de facto school and housing segregation. SNCC organisers who had been beaten on the Freedom Rides, jailed during Freedom Summer and gassed at Selma had concluded that nonviolent direct action could not, on its own, deliver Black freedom. The new mood needed a name; it was given one in Mississippi.
In June 1966 James Meredith, the air force veteran who had integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, set out alone on a 220-mile ‘March Against Fear’ from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi. On the second day a sniper shot him with birdshot. As Meredith recovered in hospital, the SCLC, CORE and SNCC took up the march together. On the evening of 16 June, after another mass arrest, the new SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael climbed onto a truck in Greenwood and led the crowd in a call-and-response: ‘What do we want?’ — ‘Black Power!’ The phrase travelled through television and the next day’s newspapers across the country.
The slogan ‘Black Power’ was popularised by Stokely Carmichael, SNCC’s new chairman, on the Meredith March Against Fear in Mississippi in June 1966. It signalled SNCC’s break with the SCLC’s strategy of nonviolent integrationism and called instead for Black self-determination, separate community institutions and the right of self-defence.
What Black Power meant
Black Power was a programme as well as a chant. Carmichael argued that integration as defined by the SCLC asked Black Americans to abandon their own communities to enter white ones on white terms. He demanded political power in places where Black voters were the majority, Black control of schools and housing in Black neighbourhoods, an unembarrassed pride in African heritage, and self-defence against racist violence. The slogan ‘Black is Beautiful’, the rise of Afro hairstyles, the wearing of African clothing and the renaming of academic disciplines as ‘Black Studies’ all flowed from the same source. King distanced himself from the slogan as politically counterproductive but agreed with much of its diagnosis of Northern poverty and ghetto policing.
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
In Oakland, California, in October 1966, two community-college students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Their Ten-Point Programme demanded full employment, decent housing, an end to police brutality, the release of Black prisoners and reparations for slavery. Their first public action was an armed police-monitoring patrol: Panthers in black leather jackets and berets followed Oakland police cars at a legal distance, openly carrying loaded shotguns (which California law then permitted) and citing arrestees their constitutional rights. In May 1967 thirty Panthers walked into the California state Capitol carrying rifles to protest a bill banning open carry; the protest produced national television images and a thousand new applications to join.
The Panthers also ran what they called ‘survival programmes’: a Free Breakfast for Children programme that by 1969 was feeding around 20,000 children in 19 cities every weekday morning, free health clinics, sickle-cell anaemia testing, free legal aid, escort services for the elderly to collect pensions, and Liberation Schools. By 1970 the FBI’s director J. Edgar Hoover had described the Panthers as ‘the greatest threat to the internal security of the country’ and was running them as a top target of COINTELPRO, the Bureau’s counter-intelligence programme.
Students often picture the Panthers solely through the iconic photographs of leather jackets, berets and rifles, and conclude they were a violent gang the FBI was right to crush. The historical picture is more complicated. The Panthers were targets of COINTELPRO sabotage, including forged letters that fed feuds with rival groups, paid informants inside the leadership, and police raids: on 4 December 1969 the Chicago police, working from FBI intelligence, killed the 21-year-old Illinois Panther chairman Fred Hampton in his bed during a pre-dawn raid. Top-band interpretation answers can hold the survival programmes, the armed self-defence, the criminality of some chapter members and the federal repression in the same frame, rather than picking one and discarding the rest.
The Mexico Olympics, 16 October 1968
Fourteen days after Mexico City police killed an unknown number of student protesters in the Tlatelolco massacre, two Black American sprinters stood on the medal rostrum at the Mexico Olympics. Tommie Smith had won the 200m gold medal in a world record of 19.83 seconds. John Carlos had taken bronze. As The Star-Spangled Banner began, both men bowed their heads and raised a black-gloved fist in what they called a ‘human-rights salute’. They wore no shoes, in protest at Black poverty; Carlos’s beads remembered Black Americans who had been lynched, and Smith’s black scarf stood for Black pride. The Australian silver medallist Peter Norman wore the same Olympic Project for Human Rights badge as the two Americans in solidarity. Within forty-eight hours the US Olympic Committee, after IOC president Avery Brundage threatened to ban the whole US track team, expelled Smith and Carlos from the Olympic village; both received death threats on returning home and were unable to find work for years.
For the international press the Mexico salute became the visual shorthand for Black Power. It rebuked the United States in front of a global television audience, refused to perform patriotism while Black Americans were dying in Vietnam at disproportionate rates, and stood in solidarity with the wider 1968 protest year — Paris, Prague, the Tlatelolco students, the assassinations of King in April and Robert Kennedy in June.
On 16 October 1968 Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze) raised black-gloved fists on the 200m medal rostrum at the Mexico Olympics during the US national anthem. The shoeless feet referred to Black poverty, the beads to lynching victims and the scarf to Black pride; both men were expelled from the Olympic village within forty-eight hours and went home to death threats and a job blacklist.
Historians who emphasise the achievements of Black Power point to the Free Breakfast programme (the Nixon administration enlarged the federal school-breakfast programme partly to outflank the Panthers); to Carmichael’s articulation of ‘institutional racism’ that has remained the standard analytical category in policy and academic writing; to the cultural break-through of Afro-American Studies, ‘Black is Beautiful’ and the Olympic salute; and to the survival programmes’ demonstration that Black communities could organise their own welfare state from below. Historians who emphasise decline point to the Panthers’ collapse under COINTELPRO surveillance, internal feuds and criminal entanglements by the mid-1970s; to the Olympic Project for Human Rights’ failure to deliver lasting institutional change inside US athletics; and to the slogan’s political cost in alienating white liberal allies that the legislative coalitions of 1964-65 had depended on. Both readings rest on solid evidence and answer Q3(d) prompts well.