Radical Groups, Individuals, and Organizations Essay

Total Length: 761 words ( 3 double-spaced pages)

Total Sources: 2

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The Black Arts Movement refers specifically to the rise of African-American literature in the 1960s. Writer and activist Amiri Baraka started the movement in Harlem in response to the assassination of Malcolm X and actively encouraged black writers to use their voices to tell their stories. The movement went outside of the realm of written art to include theater and other forms of expression. It led to the development of cultural studies programs at universities that focused on the idea that being black in the United States was a different cultural experience than being white, and helped highlight social differences between black and white America.

The Black Student Movement is an organization at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It was established because of Black student dissatisfaction with both the growth of the black student population at the school and the NAACP chapter at the school. It became an active voice for students at the school, and presented demands to the school's chancellor. The Black Student Movement also identified with working blacks at the school, particularly food workers, showing an overlap in social class that did not necessarily exist in other areas of the civil rights movement.
As the above examples make clear, the Black Power Movement was not a single specific organization, but the way of referring to black Americans attempting to gain control over those organizations and institutions that impacted their daily lives. The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the Black Arts Movement, and the Black Student Movement could all be said to be part of the overall Black Power Movement. It was not necessarily in disagreement with the more passive approach to civil rights that had been advocated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, because those earlier approaches did largely depend on black self-sufficiency in certain areas. However, Black Power grew in the late 1960s as blacks grew increasingly dissatisfied with the incremental changes of the Civil Rights Movement.

References

Estate of Malcolm X (2012). Biography. Retrieved May 13, 2012 from Malcolm X website:

http://www.malcolmx.com/about/bio.html

Huey P. Newton Foundation. (2012). What was the Black Panther Party? Retrieved May 13,

2012 from BlackPanther.org website: http://www.blackpanther.org/legacynew.htm.....

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