Black Power pioneers have a message for today’s movement for change

Like so many other turning points in Black history, it started with a police incident.

In the summer of 1966, America’s top civil rights leaders had descended on Mississippi for what became known as the Meredith March. They were making their way from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi to carry on a solo voting rights march begun by James Meredith, the Black activist who had integrated the University of Mississippi three years earlier. Meredith had been shot by a White supremacist and hospitalized with severe bullet wounds.

When the march reached Greenwood, Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael, the recently named chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), got permission from a local Black school to erect sleeping tents on its grounds. But as he was helping to put up the tents, he was arrested by the local White police chief, known as “Buff” Hammond, and dragged to the local jail.

As Carmichael awaited bail that afternoon, he counted the number of times —27—that he had been imprisoned in the South since joining SNCC as a Howard University undergraduate. By the time he was released, he was primed to adopt a defiant new slogan that a SNCC comrade, Willie Ricks, had been testing in small churches along the route.