About the Series

Fifty summers ago, SNCC’s chairman, Stokely Carmichael, joined civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to steer the treacherous Mississippi March Against Fear.  The massive protest careened through Mississippi cotton towns, organizing residents and battling segregationists.  By June 16, 1966, the March had stopped in Greenwood, Mississippi, one of the many majority Black polities still ruled by White minorities.  “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothing,” Carmichael shouted at a Greenwood rally.  “What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!”  “What do you want?” Carmichael screamed.  “Black Power!” disempowered Greenwood Blacks screamed back.

 

Carmichael’s exclamation rang true in 2016--the year that marked its fiftieth anniversary.  Nearly a half a century later, activist Alicia Garza wrote a love letter that proclaimed that “Black Lives Matter,” igniting a movement that would mature in Black Power’s golden anniversary. Like Sixties Black power activists, Garza has been led by notions of self-determination, “self-actualization, self-love and being really rooted in who we are unapologetically.” This ethos has spread like wildfire, with cities and college campuses ablaze with sit-ins and protests filled with activists demanding universal recognition of black people’s humanity and rights.  In 1966, Carmichael ignited a movement. Today’s activists are channeling his unequivocal demand into a new movement that both pays homage to and expands Black power’s central ideals and symbols.

The Black Power Series is the first scholarly series dedicated to chronicling Black Power, its antecedents, and its capacious legacy. 

Black Power Series - Angela Davis
Black Power Series - Stokely Carmichael
“Seeking to celebrate and document this capacious movement, the Black Power Series is the first scholarly series exploring Black Power and Black radicalism in the most expansive sense.”

The editors seek submissions that explore the following:

 

Historical examinations of the Black Power era including:

  • Grassroots organizing and activism
  • Movements for black political, economic, and cultural definition and autonomy
  • Biographies of individual activists and organizations
  • Regional studies of manifestations of Black Power in the United States and around the world
  • The roots and antecedents of Black Power
  • The intersections of Black Power and popular culture
  • The intersections of Black Power and other movements for justice

Intellectual histories of the meaning of Black Power and black radicalism including:

  • Scholarship that historicizes the evolution, meaning, and expressions of Black Power and its tenets
  • Histories that identify and interrogate key progenitors of Black Power and black radical thought
  • Analyses that challenge popular perceptions of radicalism, liberalism, and activism

Anthologies and Autobiographies including:

  • Autobiographies by Black Power era activists
  • Collected editions of organizational documents
  • Collected editions of individual activists’ writings and publications
  • Thematic readers focused on specific facets of the Black Power era