For the St. Louis American
For all the multitude of mainstream media outlets covering the astonishing march on Jena, Louisiana, only one – the BBC – dared to state what the massive protest reflected: “black power.”
Notwithstanding all the lofty rhetoric about justice rather than race being the issue, the scene witnessed around the world that day was a sea of black folks, all defiantly dressed in black, unloading from planes, trains and busses from across the land to serve up to a Southern town trapped in the past an old-fashioned “can of whup ass.”
In Jena, racial injustice, America’s enduring problem, collided with black power – the mass rallying and mobilization of African Americans – and a new movement has perhaps been born.
Maybe though, rather than a new Civil Rights Movement, Jena is the new Black Power Movement.
When Kwame Toure (then Stokely Charmichael) – over Martin Luther King’s objection – announced during their June 1966 march on Jackson, Mississippi that the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) would thenceforth pursue a strategy of “black power,” it shook the nation and shifted the paradigm from a discussion of integration to a conversation about power in this multi-cultural nation. The New York Times reported that the march known as the “March Against Fear” made it clear that “a new philosophy is sweeping the civil rights movement.”
The Black Power Movement manifested the yearning of black students and youth for something other than assimilation into America’s white society and culture. Black power was the cry of America’s African descendants to control their own destiny – to govern the institutions in their communities and have a share of the economic pie. It was a cry that swelled a people once enslaved with a new-found identity, soulfully put to rhythm by James Brown: “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud!”
But, as King feared, the more the voice of black power rose the more the activism of whites in the movement shrank. Consequently, the Civil Rights Movement, in order to appease and maintain coalitions with white supporters, morphed the aspirations of African Americans into a “minority” movement and then a “diversity” movement.
The Jena movement, however, is black to the bone. It is as basic as black people standing up for other black people in a nation where 30 million African Americans still find themselves at only the perimeter of power. Jena’s gravitational force has pulled people of conscience – of all colors – into its righteous cause. And maybe this is the new movement – a 21st century black consciousness that draws, rather than alienates, white America.
Maybe in this new movement African Americans who have integrated into the upper echelons of society will not feel apprehensive about playing the proverbial race card, finally understanding that in America, rights for blacks are systemically dealt from the bottom of the deck. Maybe in this new movement a rejuvenated sense of black pride will emerge as armor against fratricidal black-on-black crime, and maybe it will inspire in our wayward black youth a needed sense of purpose.
Maybe the new movement will extend beyond the Jena Six, calling attention to America’s discriminatory criminal justice system and become the wind that will propel African Americans in villages, towns and cities like St. Louis to, as Kwame Toure simply defined black power, “get the power where they constitute a majority … to institute justice.”