The Black Power Movement

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The Black Power Movement was an imperative in American history. It refers to a period during the 1960s when African-Americans, or blacks, changed their views about the manner by which they should achieve economic power, political power, and civil rights. The movement evolved during a time when blacks were said to be equal citizens of the United States of America, although the realities of life readily proved otherwise.
Why did the Black Power Movement come into existence?
The Black Power Movement grew out of black dissatisfaction with the Civil Rights Movement in the second half of the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement was a movement that emerged in 1890 after the system of Jim Crow which included exclusion and degradation of the citizenship rights of African Americans. The main aspects were racial segregation – upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, voter suppression in the southern states, and private acts of violence aimed at African Americans, unimpeded by authorities. The efforts made by organisations like the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), the Students’ Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) and leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. to conquer the ‘separate but equal’ principle were significant as they gained the black people of the USA two acts, the Civil Rights Act by the American Congress in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Significant acts of civil disobedience helped significantly in securing these acts e.g. the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, the sit-ins of 1960, the Birmingham Campaign of 1963 and Selma-Montgomery marches of 1965. Despite these efforts the Black Power Movement emerged out of contempt with the Civil Rights Moveme...

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...d by leaders such as Malcolm X.

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