Comments Elsewhere

A lot of people on the Left who participated in, or supported, Black Power and the Black Panther Party criticized King in particular, the SCLC, and the emphasis on integration as the be-all and end-all of liberation for Black people. Kwame Toure (nee Stokeley Carmichael) and Jamil al-Amin (nee H. Rap Brown) were two of the leading figures, and the trajectory of SNCC from 1965 to 1967 an indicative moment. Carmichael and Brown both explicitly criticized integrationist civil rights legislation as a mere palliative, began talking about “self-determination” for Black people as the proper goal rather than “integration” into existing social structures, and aimed to align the Black liberation movement in the United States with revolutionary Leftist movements in Africa and the Third World broadly. The Nation had a bit of a discussion of the criticisms in broader historical context (reviewing the radicals of the Old Left as well as the New) back in 1998, by Robin D. G. Kelly, entitled “Integration: What’s Left?”; you can find it online at http://tinyurl.com/byq5w … Stokeley Carmichael’s SNCC position paper on “The Basis of Black Power” is also online at http://tinyurl.com/e4okd — which defends Black self-determination and Black nationalism, although it mostly leaves the criticism of the NAACP and SCLC integrationist approach tacit rather than explicit.)