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Exhibit: Black Power, Then and Now

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor

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The exhibit, "Legacy: Understanding Black Power Forty Years Later," at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, brought to mind the scene at a Kwanzaa gathering during the 80's. I had come home to Philadelphia from college and—in the high-ceilinged parlor of an old, spacious town home—an older man with a beard went on a tirade against those of us he considered 1980's buppies. In his mind, we were ungrateful heirs to the promises of Black Power that his generation had bequeathed to us during the 1960's and '70's. As all eyes turned toward him, another man walked up to him with an air of consolation. "Don't blame them," he said to his friend. "We're the ones who dropped the ball."

Black Power Collage

That moment, and the roiling emotions of betrayal, anger and loss that filled the room, formed the subtext for me as I stood in the university's main library and viewed the modest exhibit, which has the feel of an intimate and urgent conversation in a public place. Filled with memorabilia such as books by poets Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni, a "Free Angela Davis" button, and a 45 of "What's Going On?" by Marvin Gaye, the show is an attempt by some members of the Black Power generation to define for themselves, and define for today's youth, their lasting legacy and impact on American society and the world.

It is a marked and far-reaching impact, yet, somehow, an unheralded one. Glancing at the exhibit's topics, which include "Life Stories of Black Power," "Black Vision of Higher Learning," and "Black Power in the Movies," it is clear that one reason for this lack attention is that far more credit for that era's racial progress has been given to the civil rights movement and to what is commonly referred to as the civil rights generation.

Some define the Black Power generation as those who were more closely aligned to the fiery Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, who was assassinated in1965, or as those who joined the Black Panther Party, a militant self-defense organization that sprang up during 1966.

But many histories, including the one cited in this show, actually bridge the Civil Rights and the Black Power movements in a decisive moment during June 1966. Then, Stokely Carmichael, the 25-year-old leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee called out for "Black Power" at a Mississippi rally in response to the sniper shooting of James Meredith, the first Black student to attend to University of Mississippi.

"What we need is Black power!" said Carmichael, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture. What followed at that rally, this exhibit explains, "is a call and response that echoe[d] in many settings over the next 10 years, as a speaker ask[ed] 'What do you want?' and the crowd respond[ed]'Black Power!'" Unlike the older leadership of the civil rights movement, younger people questioned whether the acquisition of Black rights depended on the good will of Whites and, at that point, 12 years after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated the nation's public schools, they were tiring of the doctrine of go-slow patience.

Forty years later, it is sometimes difficult for later generations to draw a simple line between the achievements of each movement. For example, Black Power advocates claim an emphasis on Black ownership and control–such as Baltimore's own Sojourner-Douglass College, founded by an educator named Charles Simmons, and Black Classic Press, a Baltimore-based publishing and printing business founded by former Black Panther Defense Captain Paul Coates. But some more closely aligned with civil rights leadership, such as members of the Black Congressional Caucus, for example, also championed federal support for Black and all minority-owned small businesses. Even though the civil rights movement may claim access to education as one of its accomplishments, militant student protests at colleges across the country led to the birth and survival of Black Studies programs that challenged and changed what is considered history, knowledge and truth. A remarkable tidbit of this show is a 26-year time line that highlights the birth of such Black Studies programs around the country, beginning with San Francisco State University in 1968, and many universities, including Harvard, Yale and Ohio State, in 1969. The time line is not comprehensive, yet it chronicles an important history of the Black Power Movement, which emphasized self-definition and self-determination more than integration.

"By affirming Blackness, not just to make people proud but to shape how we see the world and what we expect from it, Black Power elevated the importance of group identity," says the show's accompanying brochure catalogue. "Today, in a world where people without identity have no value and little prospect, Black Power has shown us how we can affirm humanity by shaping any number of worlds, with any group at its center."

The show's organizers are conscious, at the same time, of how group identity and niche are marketed and sold today as just another commodity. Citing the sale of Black Entertainment Television to Viacom for $3 billion by Robert Johnson three years ago, the text asks, "What exactly did he sell, and who really owns it — The Black Franchise, the collective asset Blackness represents? Those questions mean little without the experience of Black Power 40 years ago."

Many members of the university's Black Faculty and Staff Association, which organized the show, "grew up during the period of Black Power and now grow old in a world changed by its ideas," says the catalogue. They cite with satisfaction, the impact they had on other groups, including peace activists, women, Latinos, Asians, gays, and even the elderly. This group of Black Power veterans is more embracing of themselves and generations that have come afterward than the man at the Kwanzaa party two decades ago. They are not looking at who dropped the ball. Rather they have put on exhibit how African Americans ran with the ball, and how the Black community–and groups the world over—have won.

A cyber version of Legacy: Understanding Black Power Forty Years Later" is posted at http://www.jhu.edu/~bfsa/bpexhibit/. The campus exhibit is on view until June 15 at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, (410)-516-8335. Hours: Monday-Friday, 8am-midnight; Friday-Saturday, 8am-10pm; Sunday, 1pm- midnight. A reception and panel discussion is scheduled for May 6, 4:30 p.m. in Olin Auditorium on the campus. This review first appeared on www.BET.com.

— April 29, 2005

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