Has The Legacy of Black Power Faded for U.S. Blacks?

Commentary: How Sad is It that Blacks in the Diaspora Appreciate ‘Black Power’ – and We Don't?
Thursday, June 22, 2006
By: Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com

Now that the 40th anniversary of Stokely Carmichael’s changing the direction, tempo and agenda of the civil-rights movement by chanting the phrase “Black Power!” in Greenwood, Mississippi has passed with scarcely a notice from black folks, perhaps it’s time to evaluate black power’s successes and failures.

I’ve visited two places outside the United States where black folks told me that the black power movement here had an impact there. One was Grenada, where Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard were leaders in the New Jewel Movement that ousted Prime Minister Eric Gairy from power in 1979.

Bishop was one of the attendees at the Rat Island Black Power Conference in 1970. When he became prime minister of Grenada after Gairy’s ouster, Bishop and the NJM introduced several progressive programs in the country before the Marxist government imploded in 1983.

When I visited Brazil two years ago, blacks there told me how they were inspired by the black power movement in the United States. I got to see that inspiration in action at the Federal University in Bahia, the blackest province in a country and home to over 80 million people of African descent.

Scores of black students, faculty and administrators stood outside a building on the university campus, holding signs expressing support for affirmative action. But these black folks weren’t talking about the kind of affirmative action black folks in the United States advocate. Here, black Democrats talk about things like having a “critical mass” of “underrepresented minorities” at elite universities, then look you in the eye and say they aren’t talking about quotas.

Black folks in Brazil weren’t having any of that hypocrisy. They didn’t just ask for quotas in the university’s schools for medicine, industrial chemistry and dentistry. They demanded quotas. They said the dreaded q-word by name. Except in Portuguese it’s a c-word: cotes.

They got their cotes too -- inspired by black folks in the United States who, 38 years earlier, had started a movement that went international.

So I wasn’t completely surprised when I saw brothers in Brazil giving each other the black power handshake I’d seen in the United States a few years after Carmichael’s black power speech in 1966. I wasn’t surprised to see a Brazilian brother at the demonstration for quotas wearing a Malcolm X T-shirt either.

I compared that Afro-Brazilian to some young black men here in the United States. Yes, some young black men -- a dwindling number, it seems -- might wear a Malcolm X T-shirt on occasion. More common is one that reads “Stop Snitching.” Or one with a picture of not Malcolm X or Marcus Garvey, but either John Gotti or Tony Montana on it (Heaven forfend someone should produce a T-shirt with Carmichael’s picture on the front.).

What can you say to those nitwitted brothers who wear T-shirts with white mobsters on them? Gotti is the real-life organized crime boss who died in prison. Montana is the fictional protagonist of the 1983 movie “Scarface.” There’s an old saying black folks have that’s true about “Scarface:” it’s destroyed more black folks’ minds than bad wine, especially young black men.

A wealth of black heroes to choose from, and these guys wear T-shirts depicting white gangsters. What can you say to them? Nothing. The suckas would probably shoot you.

But thank heavens some black folks in the world appreciate the history of our black power movement, because Lord knows we don’t. That may explain why, when I was in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, I saw a scene I’ve yet to see duplicated in the United States.

Public schools in Salvador are predominantly black and worse than they are in America. Black folks in Salvador told me there are no math, chemistry or physics teachers in Salvador public schools.

But on one weeknight, I went to a classroom at the Steven Biko Cultural Institute, which black folks in Salvador set up to empower themselves and saw a classroom full of at least 50 students, who’d come after work to study the math, chemistry, physics and other subjects they didn’t get in public schools. Their goal was to pass the entrance exam at the Federal University.

Compare how black folks in Bahia solved one problem that resulted from poor education -- by organizing their own to empower their own -- with how black Democrats handle it here: by finding the nearest Republican to blame.

But that’s a topic for next week’s column: how today’s black Democrats have spurned the legacy of black power and failed black folks on the crucial matter of education.