Book review of Saying It Loud: 1966 — the Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement by Mark Whitaker

In “Saying It Loud: 1966 — the Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement,” Mark Whitaker charts this tumultuous period. Focusing on the high-profile events and activists who seized national attention, Whitaker aims “to capture the rich and often messy way that this historic pivot unfolded in ‘real time.’” The story moves across the nation and along cultural and political fronts, offering a fresh take on what Whitaker rightly describes as “the most dramatic shift in the long struggle for racial justice in America since the dawn of the modern Civil Rights era.”

Whitaker, a noted journalist, has written several books, including “Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance.” As editor of Newsweek, he was the first African American to lead a national news weekly. While not his central focus in “Saying It Loud,” Whitaker highlights the role of the mainstream media during this fateful year.

In Whitaker’s narrative, Carmichael and his leadership provide a way into the complex history of the Black Power movement. In 1965, as an organizer of the Lowndes County Freedom Party in Alabama, Carmichael was the driving force in implementing a new focus for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that sought to establish separate political organizations in Black communities. Its symbol was a black panther, its slogan “One Man, One Vote.” In May 1966, Carmichael commanded national attention when he became the chairman of SNCC. As he entered the media spotlight, he quickly became known for his bold style. In response to a query at his first news conference, he explained: “The goal of integration is irrelevant. Political and economic power is what Black people have to have.” When Carmichael’s statements prompted the press to characterize SNCC as anti-White, the group put out a special bulletin in a futile attempt to correct this misperception. “Organizing the strength of Negroes as a group force does not constitute ‘reverse racism,’” it explained.

As Whitaker recounts, 1966 was the year when young African Americans inspired an emphasis on Black culture, racial solidarity and community-focused organizing — all of which had a transformative impact on American life. By the summer of 1966, the Afro hairstyle was featured on the cover of Ebony announcing “The Natural Look,” and “Black” replaced “Negro” in mainstream news publications. The emergent Black Arts/Black Consciousness Movement took shape, and student protests initiated the establishment of Black studies on college campuses.

Black Power as a political movement aimed to realize the power of Black people to overcome the impoverished conditions and injustices not remedied by civil rights reforms. SNCC activists had worked for voting rights in the Deep South since 1961 and were exposed to the consequences of generations of segregation and political powerlessness. By 1966, many had turned their attention to community-focused projects designed to meet local needs.

Whitaker considers the limitations of Carmichael’s leadership as SNCC struggled to move in a new direction. His instant rise to national prominence from constant press and TV news attention took a toll. Seeing Carmichael at the peak of his media fame, Bob Moses, the legendary SNCC organizer, observed the cost. “If you move into that gravitational force field,” he said, “you face currents that you have no control over.” Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, SNCC’s formidable executive secretary, described the dilemma. There was no doubt, she wrote, that the Black Power message spoke “for the masses of black people.” But she noted the impact of Carmichael’s reliance on rhetoric and cliches to drive media coverage. “How do they apply to the lives of black people in a town where the SNCC worker is organizing a co-op or running political candidates or trying to explain the draft program or preparing a campaign against police brutality?” Smith Robinson asked.

Whitaker also delves into the work of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966. The pair grew up on the rough streets of Oakland and had frequent run-ins with the police. They participated in the radical Black political and intellectual life of the Bay Area and in 1963 met Malcolm X, who became a major influence. Malcolm X had a program, Newton recalled: “armed defense when attacked, and reaching the people with ideas and programs that speak to their condition.” The black panther symbol of the Lowndes County Freedom Party in Alabama inspired them as well. In its “Ten-Point Program,” the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense targeted the injustices plaguing poor, urban Black communities. But it was the image of armed Black men on community patrols that quickly defined the Black Panthers in the popular mind. Confrontations with the police, Newton’s arrest and the prominence of the media-obsessed Eldridge Cleaver, after he joined the organization in 1967, left the Oakland-based group in turmoil. Meanwhile, chapters of the Black Panther Party proliferated in cities across the country.

Black Power activists confronted a variety of challenges within their local organizations and in their communities. These problems were aggravated by the media’s interpretation of their actions. Coverage of the March Against Fear was telling. Hundreds of news outlets across the country rushed to condemn Carmichael’s call for Black Power, overshadowing a vicious police assault on marchers, including women and children, in Canton, Miss. Time magazine’s story on the Mississippi march was titled “Civil Rights: The New Racism.” Whitaker notes that later that summer, Carmichael attracted the attention of President Lyndon Johnson after a New York Times front-page story linked him to another SNCC organizer’s anti-White sentiments. “What makes Stokely Carmichaels?” Johnson fulminated during a phone call. “We don’t want a hell raiser.” The president requested that the FBI provide him with twice-weekly reports on Carmichael.

In closing, Whitaker writes, “The first Black Power generation seems to have played itself out by the late 1970s” in part because it was “hobbled by the FBI’s dirty tricks and their own personal fights and failings.” But the story he tells in “Saying it Loud” invites another interpretation. At a critical moment in America’s long racial reckoning, young men and women called for dramatic action to confront the poverty and injustices beyond the reach of civil rights laws. Meanwhile, the media’s portrayal of “Black Power” as racist and anti-White helped justify the FBI’s massive program of disruption that targeted leaders and communities associated with Black Power.

While Martin Luther King Jr. is not a central figure in “Saying It Loud,” 1966 marked a formative year for him. As Whitaker notes, King questioned the wisdom of Black Power as a slogan, but he understood it as “a reaction to the reluctance of white people to make the kinds of changes necessary to change the reality of the Negro.” In July 1966, King placed a full-page ad in the New York Times headlined “It is Not Enough to Condemn Black Power.” In a direct appeal to “municipal, state, and federal authorities and all men in seats of power,” he warned of what would happen if they did not address the desperate conditions that fueled the wave of urban uprisings that summer. But the Johnson administration and successive administrations did not adequately answer the call, and instead militarized policing and mass incarceration became the norm in America. We live with the consequences.

Patricia Sullivan, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, is the author of “Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White.”

1966 — the Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement

Simon & Schuster. 387 pp. $29.99