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The Concept of Black Power: Its Continued Relevance

2006; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 37; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0021934706290079

1552-4566

Winston A. Van Horne,

American History and Culture

Black studies as an institutional discipline emerged out of the many sacrifices of passionate, youthful advocates of Black power in the mid- to late 1960s. Today, the term Black power seems almost quaint, although such was assuredly not the case in the 1960s. Black power reverberated in a context of societal tremors as Black people assaulted the ramparts of de jure Jim Crow. De jure Jim Crow did crumble, and over the next two generations, Blacks made considerable societal gains. Still, the scope of Black people’s empowerment that Black power envisaged remains unrealized. It is thus well to look again at the principles, objectives, resources, and strategies of Black power to call out its continued germaneness, and by extension Black studies, to the lives of Black people and others, as a disproportionately large Black underclass blurs a small but continually expanding Black middle class.