Run: Book One

After the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, civil rights activists worked to register Black voters in districts where legal segregation had been most rigorously enforced and where barriers to voting persisted despite the new law. One of the most egregious examples was Lowndes County, Alabama, where there was not a single registered Black voter despite Black people constituting 80% of the voting-age population. Activists led by John Hulett and Stokely Carmichael came up with the idea of the LCFO as an alternative political party to challenge the Democrats, who especially in the South were often sympathetic to segregation. As a mascot, the LCFO adopted the black panther, inspiring Oakland activists Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to form the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense the following year, which would become a prominent and national organization. The LCFO had mixed success in challenging the Democratic opposition, but it did succeed in mobilizing many Black citizens to vote. It ultimately merged with the Alabama Democratic Party in 1970.

Considered one of the pioneer acts of civil rights legislation, along with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Voting Rights Act was meant to shore up the equal right to vote for all citizens, especially for Black Americans. Although the post-Civil War 14th and 15th Amendments to the US Constitution promised equal protection under the law, and the right to vote specifically, they were generally considered not to be binding upon the states for nearly another century. The Voting Rights Act forbade state and local entities from enacting any measures that had the impact of preventing people from voting, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, or keeping polling places far from places of residence or open for limited hours. Although the Supreme Court has weakened the act in recent years, such as ending the requirement that historically segregationist districts receive federal clearance for their voting measures, the VRA is considered one of the most successful pieces of legislation in modern American history.

Though popularized by Stokely Carmichael in 1966, the term had been addressed by Black American politics for decades. Although he did not use it as a slogan, Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X helped lay the intellectual foundation by preaching a doctrine of Black self-reliance and separatism, particularly in economic life, rather than relying on a white-dominated and inveterately hostile power structure. Carmichael’s adoption of the term also carried with it a critique of the civil rights movement as it had operated, which prioritized the achievement of equal rights and freedom for Black people by working with the existing power structures (particularly the Democratic Party under Johnson). The term also coincided with a time in American culture when Black pride and self-assertion were taking over after a previous emphasis on “respectability,” which critics dismissed as hewing to the standards of white culture. The term earned its greatest public recognition when Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a Black Power salute on the podium at the 1968 Games in Mexico City.