An Analysis Of Stokely Carmichael's Black Power

On January 1, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all people being held as salves would be free from that day forward. But, what were black people really emancipated from? Up until the mid-twentieth century black people in the United States were still segregated, the portrayal of their community was the stereotypical version created by whites in the media. It wasn’t until late in the civil rights movement that there was a call to black Americans to be loud and proud of whom they are. Activist “Stokely Carmichael, in his book, Black Power, clearly articulated the meaning of black power [as] “a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of

community. It is a call for black people to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject the racist institutions and values of this society.”
“At a most basic level, Carmichael was calling for African Americans to gain control of their existences within the United States, as well as abroad, and to understand that there is something special, unique, and valuable about cherishing, nourishing, and supporting black people, black cultures, and black communities.” Black people in the United States were now willing to act upon these suggestions and rise up, making people more willing to accept Sun Ra’s message. Sun Ra’s adopted persona was also influential in creating a cultural movement that would come to be known as Afrofuturism.
“Born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 22, 1914, his mother named him Herman Poole Blount.” “Sun Ra effectively detached himself from his ‘birth name’ claiming it was not his name but that of ‘an imaginary person’ that ‘never existed.’” The truth about his early life is unclear.

“For almost fifty years he evaded questions, forgot details, left false trails, and talked in allegories and parables. Sun Ra destroyed his past, and recast himself in a series of roles in a drama he spent his life creating.” During Sun Ra’s childhood “Birmingham, Alabama [was the] most segregated city in the United States. A city so racially possessed that black businesses were legally enclosed within a downtown grid, and local custom set aside a day for blacks to shop outside of it. This was the city where the Robert E. Lee Klavern boasted the largest KKK membership in

America.”
History has documented the inequalities suffered by the African American people at the hands of the white population. Even though black men and women were labeled as freed they weren’t really free and they eventually faced the Jim Crow laws in America, in addition to the other atrocities they faced. Robert A. Gibson talks about these atrocities in his course ‘The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States 1880-1950’ at Yale University. He says “Immediately following the end of Reconstruction, the Federal Government of the United States restored white supremacist control to the South and adopted a “laissez-faire” policy in regard to the Negro. The Negro was betrayed by his country. This policy resulted in Negro disfranchisement, social, educational and employment discrimination, and peonage. Deprived of their civil and human rights, Blacks were reduced to a status of quasi-slavery or “second-class” citizenship. A tense atmosphere of racial hatred, ignorance and fear bred lawless mass violence, murder and lynching.”
Due to the environment that Sun Ra spent his childhood in and the general treatment of African Americans; one can understand why he shed his identity and reinvented himself. According to John Szwed, “Sun Ra rid himself of his birth name upon moving to New York in 1961 and with it the shackles of his identity.” When asked about this reinvention Sun Ra said “[Man] has to rise above himself…transcend himself. Because the way he is, he can only follow reproductions of ideas, because he’s just a reproduction himself…He did not come from the creative system, he came from the reproductive system. But if he evolutes beyond himself, he will come up from the creative system…”
This idea for the African American population to reinvent themselves and create a place for themselves within American society and culture was a common theme among many influential figures within the black communities.

“This idea began a lifelong project [for Sun Ra] to re-envision the relationship between music, technology, society, and African American identity.” For much of Sun Ra’s career he was seen as “an offbeat, creative character at the margins of both mainstream and avant-garde jazz, a significant number of scholars in our time and place now see Sun Ra as a central figure in the era's African American embrace of science and technology. Sun Ra's art, in this view, looked to both the past and future to re-imagine and claim new metaphorical and material spaces for the

diaspora”
A former exhibition and now a book by John Corbett, Terri Kapsalis, and Anthony Elms, Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68, is a fourteen year look into the work of Sun Ra. Pathways is a peak behind the curtain at Sun Ra’s transformation through various artifacts and at the “largely untold, subcultural history of Chicago's South Side.” “Pathways also makes clear the importance of Sun Ra's collaborators and the city of Chicago to his artistic practice.”
Sun Ra was a part of a cultural movement that would come to be known as Afro-Futurism. The term was coined in 1994 by Mark Derey for African American Si-fi, but in music, it existed before it was named. What is Afro-Futurism?
Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afro-diasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken. The manufacture, migration, and mutation of concepts and approaches within the fields of the theoretical and the fictional, the digital and the sonic, the visual and the architectural exemplifies the expanded field of Afrofuturism considered as a multimedia project distributed across the nodes, hubs, rings, and stars of the Black Atlantic.

“The Chicago Afro-Futurist Underground included a host of musicians and artists such as Claude Dangerfield, who designed a number of album covers for the band.” “While much of the work on Afro-Futurism is grounded in the humanities, historians and sociologists of science and technology have in recent years explored these material interventions, which scholars refer to as technological appropriation." Pathways was a way to see these interventions made by Sun Ra. In fact, it is the only way John Szwed, Sun Ra’s biographer was able to experience these interventions. Viewing Sun Ra’s work through the lens of Afro-futurist theory he “redeployed, reconceived, and re-created the materials and metaphors of cold-war science in his artistic practice.” In Fouche’s terms these were great examples of “the embrace of science and technology in ways that go beyond aesthetic form to engage with materiality itself.” “On the level of metaphor Sun Ra constructed and performed a black knowledge society grounded both in Egypt, an ancient black technical civilization, and outer space.”