Malcolm X, Black Power and radical movements
Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam
While King’s movement built toward the Civil Rights Act, a different tradition of Black political thought was growing. Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in 1925. Imprisoned in 1946, he converted to Islam and joined the Nation of Islam (NOI), led by Elijah Muhammad. By the early 1960s, Malcolm X was the NOI’s most prominent public face, arguing that integration was a false goal and that Black Americans should build their own separate institutions. He rejected non-violence as a strategy: if attacked, Black people had the right to defend themselves “by any means necessary.”
Malcolm X broke with the NOI in 1964 after discovering Elijah Muhammad’s personal misconduct and his own pilgrimage to Mecca broadened his view of race. He founded a new organisation and moved toward a more internationalist perspective. On 21 February 1965, he was assassinated by NOI members in New York City. His autobiography, published posthumously, became one of the most influential books of the century.
Malcolm X and King differed on two fundamental points: Malcolm X rejected integration (he wanted separate Black institutions), while King sought integration; Malcolm X advocated self-defence, while King insisted on non-violence as both a moral principle and a tactical choice.
Black Power and Stokely Carmichael
In June 1966, during the March Against Fear in Mississippi, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael first used the phrase “Black Power” at a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. The phrase had different meanings for different people. For Carmichael and SNCC, it meant Black political and economic self-determination — building Black-controlled institutions rather than integrating into white ones. For many white Americans, the phrase was alarming. King himself worried it would alienate white liberals whose support the movement needed. The Watts Riots of August 1965 — six days of upheaval in a Los Angeles neighbourhood, 34 dead, over 1,000 buildings damaged — had already revealed deep frustration among Northern Black Americans untouched by the voting rights gains in the South.
In October 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. The Party had two distinct faces. The armed patrols — Black men carrying legally owned firearms monitoring police activity in Black neighbourhoods — attracted the most media attention and alarmed white Americans. But the Party also ran free breakfast programmes for schoolchildren, free medical clinics, schools, legal aid services and prisoner support. At its peak, the breakfast programme was feeding 20,000 children a day across several US cities.
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI regarded the Black Panthers as the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” The COINTELPRO programme — exposed in March 1971, when activists stole files from an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and leaked them to the press — used surveillance, informants, forged letters intended to cause internal conflict, and direct co-operation with local police in violent raids. Panther leader Fred Hampton was killed in a Chicago police raid in December 1969; subsequent investigations found he had been asleep when he was shot. The FBI shut the programme down within weeks of the leak. In 1975–76 the Senate’s Church Committee investigated it and found that it had broken the law.
The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr
On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He had been in Memphis supporting striking Black sanitation workers — an indication that in his final years he was connecting civil rights with economic justice. His assassination triggered uprisings in over 100 American cities. Robert Kennedy, announcing the news to a Black crowd in Indianapolis, was himself assassinated two months later in June 1968. The murders of both men in a single year felt to many like the end of an era of hope.
At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists on the medal podium during the US national anthem. The gesture became the most iconic image of Black Power. Smith and Carlos were suspended from the US team and faced years of ostracism. Australian silver medallist Peter Norman wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in solidarity. The image showed that Black Power was not confined to street politics — it was an international statement about the gap between American ideals and American realities.
The Black Panthers ran free breakfast programmes (feeding up to 20,000 children daily at their peak) and free medical clinics. COINTELPRO, exposed by a leak of stolen FBI files in 1971, used illegal surveillance, informants and forged letters against the Panthers, and co-operated with local police in violent raids.