The Template: Black Power Movement

Without the Black Power movement, there would most likely would not have been a student power movement. One former activist, Henry Mayer writes:

The demand for “student power” was first raised during Berkeley’s second student strike in 1966 as conscious imitation of the cry for “black power.” I make such a precise historical assertion, not only because I participated in that strike and remember the spirit of novelty, passion and the self-conscious belligerence with which we took up this variation of the black power slogan (then it it's first months of notoriety), but because its emotional roots in the civil rights struggle provide some helpful perspectives in understanding what 'student power' means” (in Schwartz 26, emphasis mine)

The most iconic images of the black power movement, of course, conjure giants like Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X. But white, high school and college age young adults made numerous contributions to the movement in the 'trenches' of organizing. For example, in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, the “Student nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters and raises civil-rights awareness in the Deep South” (Gladwell par 10).

By working for black power organizations like the NAACP and the SNCC, white students where not only able to channel their professed disaffection with mainstream culture, but also learned important organizing skills. For example, the same Freedom Summer that relied on white students was “crucially,” in Gladwell's words, “strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures” (par 19).

Just as the Black Power Movement created a vocabulary, it also set up a structural model of how to fight and subvert a social establishment. Now we can see how the context of the 1960s and 70s gave students both the intellectual grounding, though the vast expansions in enrollment, and organizational tools required to begin a mass movement, with student's participation in the Black Power campaigns. We will now look at the movements resulted from this context; specifically, the New Left and the anti-war movement.