This article explores the NAACP's reaction to the emergence of Black Power in the mid-1960s. However, Black militancy existed side by side with civil rights protesters and sometimes within single organizations.” 8 Joseph, for example, has criticized the tendency of scholars to caricature Black Power as the civil rights movement's “evil twin.” According to Joseph, “Civil Rights historiography too often castigates the Black Power era as a betrayal of the supposedly halcyon days of the non-violent Southern movement. 6 Following Tyson's lead, a small army of scholars have probed the role of armed self-defense within the southern struggle, challenged traditional assumptions, and emphasized continuities and similarities, rather than decisive breaks and dramatic differences, between the civil rights and Black Power movements. Tyson has used Williams's advocacy of armed self-defense, “independent Black political action,” and “Black cultural pride” to argue that “the ‘civil rights movement’ and ‘the Black Power movement,’ often portrayed in very different terms, grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom.” According to Tyson, the conventional dichotomy between “civil rights” and “Black Power” often serves to obscure rather than enlighten the scholarly discussion. Williams, the NAACP activist and black freedom fighter from Monroe, North Carolina. Tyson, who has written extensively on Robert F. Leading this wave of revisionism is Timothy B. 5 An associated development has been the emergence of a challenge to the traditional view that sees Black Power as marking a distinct break from the civil rights movement. Reacting against a historiography that has been, in the words of Charles Payne, “generally elitist,” recent scholars of the civil rights movement have moved beyond the early emphasis on national leadership and organizational history to focus on the black struggle at the local level. struggling to hold the movement together. This placed them in opposition to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League, which criticized the slogan in no uncertain terms, leaving Dr. Humphrey castigated it as reverse racism, declaring that “there is no room in America for racism of any color.” 3 Within the civil rights coalition Black Power precipitated a decisive split, as both the SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) embraced versions of Black Power, dropped their commitment to nonviolence, and questioned the value of interracialism. For its critics, Black Power symbolized a dangerous new force and conjured up images of “Black Jacobinism” and the “Mau Mau . . . coming to the suburbs at night.” 2 Vice President Hubert H. The sudden emergence of the “Black Power” slogan created a political firestorm within both the civil rights movement and the broader body politic. What do you want?” The crowd thundered back, “Black Power!” 1 What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” Carmichael proclaimed that “every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned tomorrow to get rid of the dirt . . . from now on when they ask what you want, you know what to tell 'em. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain't got nothin'. “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin' us is to take over. “This is the 27 th time I have been arrested-and I ain't going to jail no more, I ain't going to jail no more,” he told the several hundred mostly local African Americans. The SNCC leader had been released from jail minutes before and acknowledged the “roar” of the angry crowd with a “raised arm and a clenched fist” as he moved forward to speak. O n the evening of 17 June 1966, Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), addressed a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. John Morsell, NAACP assistant executive director, 3 November 1966 I ntroduction
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