Editor’s Note: This piece on the black power movement is the sixth installment in a series by Speaker Gingrich on American despotism. Listen to The American Spectator’s exclusive interview with the Speaker here. Find the first in the series here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, and the fifth here. 

The rise in FBI investigations and monitoring of the civil rights movement, as discussed in my last installment in this series, was intensified by two factors. 

First, there was a real Soviet threat that tried to infiltrate American society at a variety of levels. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had built his long career with a deep focus on defeating communism. Hoover assumed any effort to change the status quo was “subversive.” The civil rights movement was clearly trying to undermine and replace the entire structure of power in the white South, so Hoover put it in that category. There were some genuine ties to people who had been — or were still — communists. And some of the civil rights movement’s language echoed communist attacks on America, so Hoover felt vindicated. In addition, as the struggle went on in the 1960s and the Vietnam War grew more intense, there were clear ties between some black activists and Cuba, North Vietnam, Communist China, and North Korea.

Second, counter to the teachings of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., there was a growing level of black militancy that used and accepted violence as a legitimate response to repression and violence directed against African Americans — by the police and white-supremacy groups. This was captured in the term “black power.”

To most Americans in the 1960s, black power was seen as a threat. In the context of the time, it was explicitly anti-white, anti-Western civilization, and anti-American ideology. It gave moral legitimacy to an anti-police, pro-criminal worldview that seemed to translate into a dramatic rise in crime. (In 1967, there were riots in more than 150 cities.)

The parallels with Black Lives Matter 60 years later are remarkable. In both movements, a remarkably small number of people developed all the ideas and language. Black power as a militant concept can be traced back to the 1962 publication of Robert Williams’ book Negroes with Guns. There is a general agreement that this description of the need for armed self-protection in the black community was a major influence on Huey P. Newton and the founding of the Black Panther Party. 

Williams was a Marine veteran who had returned home to Monroe, North Carolina. When three white men were attacking black women and the white power structure refused to convict them, Williams concluded that black people had to arm and be prepared to protect themselves. Since there were a lot of African-American veterans from World War II and Korea, there were a lot of trained firearms users. In a way, this need for self-defense was a throwback to the violence of the Reconstruction Era, when the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist organizations had waged a campaign of terror against newly freed blacks and white Republicans who had come South to help with integration.

Two famous Louisiana cases involved large, horrible massacres. In Opelousas, Louisiana, in 1868, white supremacists methodically killed about 250 African Americans. They also destroyed the Republican newspapers and drove white Republicans out of the parish, killing 30 to 50 of them. After that massacre, all trying to vote Republican were risking their lives. Five years later, in April 1873, an Easter Sunday massacre occurred in Colfax, Louisiana. An estimated 60 to 150 African Americans were killed when white supremacists decided to drive all Republican activities out of the parish. As historian Eric Foner wrote, “[E]very election [in Louisiana] between 1868 to 1876 was marked by rampant violence and pervasive fraud.” So, the Democratic Party’s use of coercion and election fraud has a long history.

By 1962, the balance of power was shifting. Segregation was being uprooted, and the number of African Americans with military and police experience was rising dramatically. Williams’ book argued that blacks had to be prepared to defend themselves and could not rely on the larger community for protection. (READ MORE from Newt Gingrich: American Despotism: The Great Upheaval Over Race Begins)

As NPR reported in 2006, Williams said: “We must make use of the gas bombs, the lye cans, the ice picks, the switchblade, the axe, the hatchet, the razor, the brick and the bullet. We shall meet machine gun with machine gun, hand grenade with hand grenade in a new spirit of meeting violence with violence.”

Williams wrote in his book: “It is common knowledge that the master race of the ‘free world’ is out to export North American manufactured racism. Racism in the USA is as much a problem as was Nazism.” He went on to write that “the racists in America are the most brutal people on earth.” He claimed he “lived all my life under American oppression.” An example of why many worried that black power was inherently anti-American was his statement that “my cause is the same as Asians against the imperialist. It is the same as the African against the white savage. It is the same as Cuba against the white supremacist imperialist.” This kind of language led Hoover to say in 1968 that the Black Panthers were “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

The Rise of the Black Power Movement

The first great popularizer of black power was Stokely Carmichael (who later took the name Kwame Ture in honor of two African anti-colonial leaders). Carmichael, as the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said, “When you talk of Black power, you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization had created.” Carmichael had participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides and was arrested more than 30 times. He worked within the system until he went to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his party refused to seat the integrated Mississippi Freedom Party’s delegation and instead aimed to seat the all-white delegation that had been picked in a process that excluded black participation.

Carmichael was radicalized by the pro-segregation move and attacked “totalitarian liberal opinion.” He expanded on that, saying, “[T]he liberal really wants … to bring about change which will not in any way endanger his position.” Carmichael had been deeply influenced by Frantz Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth. He came to see the struggle against colonialism in Africa and Asia as parallel to the struggle against segregation and white domination in the United States.

In 1966, SNCC expelled all its white members and became a black-only organization. As Carmichael put it: “We were never fighting for the right to integrate. We were fighting against white supremacy.” He rejected the King’s nonviolent approach, saying: “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”

In 1967, H. Rap Brown (who later took the name Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) succeeded Carmichael as the head of SNCC. Brown toured the country calling for violence. His most famous quote was: “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” In July 1967, Brown went to Cambridge, Maryland, and said: “It’s time for Cambridge to explode, baby. Black folks built America, and if America don’t come around, we’re going to burn America down.”

That night, at least 17 buildings burned down in Cambridge. There is a controversy about whether it was an accidental fire that spread because the fire department did not like going into black neighborhoods or whether it was deliberate arson by black power advocates. At the time, the blame was put on Brown and the black power movement.

The Cambridge riot and fires were just the beginning of a summer of violence with no equal in modern America (even including the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020). There were more than 150 race riots that summer. In June riots broke out in Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Tampa. In July the riots spread to Birmingham, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Newark, New Britain, New York City, Rochester, and Toledo.

The most powerful riots were in Detroit. From July 23 to July 28, 1967, Detroit was out of control. Ultimately, President Johnson had to send in elements of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions from the regular army while also mobilizing the 46th Division of the Michigan National Guard. When the riots ended, 1,200 people were injured and 7,200 arrested. There were an estimated 10,000 rioters who looted or damaged approximately 2,500 buildings. Of those, 412 buildings were totally destroyed. The Detroit riots stimulated copycat riots in eight other Michigan cities that month.

Contrasting the turmoil in the black community, 1967 was “the summer of love” for white liberals. More than 100,000 people gathered in the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. The song “San Francisco” by Scott McKenzie was wildly popular. It was paralleled by the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.” Of course, cities were burning and the Vietnam War underway, but not in San Francisco.

Also that year, Carmichael joined with Charles V. Hamilton to write Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. They developed the concept of “institutional racism” as a key focus of black power, which shapes the woke movement to this day. Carmichael and Hamilton repudiated middle-class values and mores: “The values of that class are based on material aggrandizement, not the expansion of humanity.… [W]e reject the goal of assimilation into middle-class America.” Middle-class values included the work ethic, a sense of order, the need to achieve, and a variety of habits that had emerged early in the Industrial Revolution. So this repudiation of middle-class mores ultimately led to the defense of not learning, not working, and not obeying the rules or the law.

Black Power’s Impact on Culture

A direct pattern can be traced from Carmichael and Hamilton to today’s 13 Baltimore City high schools in which not a single student can do math. If the emphasis is on “the expansion of humanity,” how can things like facts, skills, and habits be allowed to get in the way of expressing oneself? (WATCH: Speaker Gingrich Reveals America’s Current Crisis)

The tragedies of the 1960s for African Americans were manifold. The combination of black power, identity politics, the emerging drug culture, and the anti-family Great Society trapped millions of black Americans into a culture of dependency. Charles Murray’s Losing Ground and Martin Olasky’s Tragedy of American Compassion both chronicle the disastrous human costs of the decision to expand government dependency and move toward a bureaucrat defined world. As Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan later analyzed in his essay “Defining Deviancy Down,” the willingness to replace middle-class values and discipline with a culture that accepts failure, blames failures on vague societal forces, and refuses to teach people the requirements of work and learning was devastating.

At the same moment legal segregation was being defeated, a new self-imposed psychological segregation was being developed by leftists who refused to accept the requirement of individual effort and instead blamed all problems on “them.” “Them” was presumably white racism and deliberate anti-black prejudice. You, the individual, were never at fault. If you couldn’t read, it was America’s fault. If you could not show up for work, it was the system’s fault. If you were failing in life, becoming drug addicted, and earned a living as a drug dealer, criminal, pimp, or prostitute, it was because society was oppressing you. Your group identity protected you from personal responsibility. 

This replacement of individual identity and responsibility with group identity and group repression has created a cultural crisis with which we still refuse to deal. We are so intimidated by the threat of being labeled “racist” that we cannot have an honest discussion about the cultural roots of failing schools, the institutional causes of massive levels of crime, or the collapse of the family (and the disappearance of fathers) as central crises that underlie most of our deepest social problems.

The power of the idea of “black power” was driven home at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, when two U.S. medalists in the 200-meter race stood with arms raised in clenched fists while the National Anthem was played at their award ceremony. The picture went worldwide and drove home the sense of black unrest.

Black Panthers Target Police

While Carmichael was writing a book, Newton and Bobby Seale were founding the Black Panther Party. Initially, the Black Panthers were a group dedicated to “citizen policing.” California had an open-carry law, and they walked the streets of Oakland armed with shotguns, serving as vigilantes against anti-black violence by the Oakland police. In their boldest publicity effort, the Black Panthers went to the California Assembly openly carrying their shotguns. The law was changed shortly thereafter.

The intensity of the Black Panther opposition to the police was highlighted when the group’s own newspaper asserted “off the pig” and “the only good pig is a dead pig.” Attacks on the police went up 500 percent in Los Angeles between 1964 and 1969. They went up 70 percent in Detroit in 1969 alone. David Hilliard, the Black Panthers Party chief of staff, proclaimed at a rally, “We will kill Richard Nixon.”

Naturally, the police and FBI responded. The FBI ultimately had 67 informants in the Black Panther Party. The Chicago police tracked down Fred Harper, a leading activist, and shot him more than 90 times in a frenzy of revenge for the Black Panthers advocating killing police.

In 1969, William Lee Brent, a Black Panther Party member, highjacked a commercial jet to Cuba, where he spent 37 years in exile. In 1970, Newton went to Communist China to study Maoism. By 1971, the Black Liberation Army, an even more violent and militant group, had attacked police in New York, Atlanta, and San Francisco. They set off a substantial number of bombs around the country. One estimate is that they killed at least 13 police in what they considered “urban guerrilla warfare.” Coming during the Vietnam War — and with Che Guevara’s popularity on the left as an advocate of revolution — the system responded with fear and aggression against this kind of threat. By 1972, the sense of identity politics had grown powerful enough that the National Black Political Convention, held in Gary, Indiana, excluded whites and was a black-only conference. (READ MORE from Newt Gingrich: American Despotism: How the ’60s and Early ’70s Ignited the Culture Wars)

As dangerous as the black power movement’s ideas and, at times, actions, were, its greater impact was the influence it had on white liberals. In an effort to gain the approval of black power advocates, white liberals became increasingly more radical, anti-American, scornful of the law and police, and contemptuous of middle-class values. 

But that’s the topic of my next essay.

For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com.