Hoang Le
HIST 1302 – 502
Paper 2
11/19/2014
The Black Power movement was a collective social and political expression of pride, strength, and self-determination during the late 1960s and 1970s in the United States. It was a logical progress of the African Americans civil rights movement. However, the era of Black Power movement overlapped with an expansion of African Americans’ political power development and therefore, it was interpreted differently within and outside the black communities. The decade of 1960s was the time of direct activism. As Timothy Tyson stated in his book Blood Done Sign My Name, “love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.” It was an extraordinary time in African Americans history when they realized they have the power to reverse the injustice, discrimination, and sufferings that they had gone through in the past. With more and more knowledge and education, black Americans wanted to have the power to diminish the so-called White supremacy. In Eyes on the Prize show The Time Has Come, an African American man said, “we look at Miss America, we see white. We look at Miss World, we see white. We look at Miss Universe, we see white. Even tigers from the kingdom and jungle in black Africa are white.” For the first time, all African Americans stood on the same side and stopped being afraid, as Martin Luther King, Jr pointed out in The Time Has Come, there would not be enough jails if the government decided to arrest all of them. The year 1966 was the year that African Americans decided to develop their own culture, to be proud of being black, and to refuse the use of the word Negro. They