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The Black Power movement never escaped the outrage that birthed it. Even now, decades after its heyday has passed, Black Power is remembered for its anger. The iconic photos of the movement are often severe: urban unrest, Black Panthers in berets and leather jackets, fists clenched and mouths open in protest. Angela Davis, the Black Power activist launched to prominence during her two years as a political prisoner, has said that images of her from that khbrknews period show her either “as a conspiratorial and monstrous Communist (i.e., anti-American) whose unruly natural hairdo symbolized black militancy (i.e., anti-whiteness)” or as “a charismatic and raucous revolutionary ready to lead the masses into battle.” Images of Davis as either a danger or a hero accentuated her militancy. Both sets of images, she wrote in a 1994 essay “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia,” left her wanting: “violated on the first account, and deficient on the second.”
Rather than outrage, however, the emotion most befitting Black Power is love. Certainly, Black Power marked a more radical approach to the freedom pursuit than what many civil rights activists demanded. Emerging out of the work left undone by the civil rights movement, Black Power asserted the centrality of shifting the terms of order—of changing who had power and how power was expressed. An ambitious blend of sacrifice and determination, love was the key dimension allowing Black Power activists to struggle against powerful interests that opposed them.
Beginning in the 1960s and lasting until at least the 1980s, Black Power was both a paradigm and a movement. It focused on transforming the nature of power in the United States precisely because it began where the civil rights movement stalled: after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts had been signed but when racism still defined U.S. institutions of housing, education,…
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