Summary: Today we will look at various liberation movements of the 1960s, each of which sought to invert the negative cultural valuation given to its group. We will focus in particular on Black Power, and we will look at the influence of black nationalism on other liberation movements. Today's lecture begins a week-long consideration of the 1960s, and of that decade's emphasis on cultural rebellion and personal fulfillment. Among other things, we will briefly cosider the women's movement and its late-sixties/early-seventies slogan, "The personal is political."

I. Black Power

A . Context:

"Our nation is moving toward two societies -- one black, one white -- separate and unequal."

--National Advisory Council on Civil Disorders, 1968

1. response to slow pace of change, persistence of white racism

2. also response to civil rights movement's failure to address black poverty and other problems of ghetto life

B.Origins: term "Black Power" originated in 1966 in a statement by Stokely Carmichael, head of SNCC

"The only way we gonna stop them white men from whippin' us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain't got nothin'. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!" -- Stokely Carmichael

1. reflected tactical shift in African-American liberation movement from nonviolence and goal of legal equality

2. to potential use of violence and goal of African-American political, economic, and cultural empowerment

3. Black Panthers formed in 1966

4. riots reflect growing racial tensions, 1964-68 (look at newsreel footage of the Watts riot)

C. Cultural dimensions of Black Power: "Black is beautiful"

1. repudiation of dominant culture's negative valuation of blackness

2. affirmation of African heritage and of separate, African-American culture

3. Black Arts Movement: "The political values inherent in the Black Power concept are now finding concrete expression in the aesthetics of Afro-American dramatists, poets, choreographers, musicians, and novelists." -Larry Neal

LET'S LOOK AT LARRY NEAL, "THE CULTURAL FRONT," Liberator, June, 1965

a. importance of self-representation

b. productive autonomy

c. political engagement and cultural nationalism

II. Related liberation movements

A. Red Power

1. not solely attributable to Black Power -- originates in early sixties

2. struggle for Native-American liberation from poverty, assimilationism, and political invisibility

3. innovative, confrontational tactics: Alcatraz takeover, 1968

4. affirmation of separate, Native-American culture

B. Chicano Power

1. Cesar Chaves and National Farm Workers Union adopt civil rights model

2. younger Chicano and Chicana activists adopt Black Power model

C. Gay Power

1. began with riot at Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, 1969

2. emergence as broad-based, grassroots movement owes much to earlier gay rights activities and to influence of other liberation movements

D. "Second Wave" Feminism

1. Liberal feminism

a. contexts:

i. feminism ebbed to its lowest point in the 1950s as Americans celebrated domesticity

ii. more women received higher education

iii. married women became secondary wage earners

-- confronted sex and wage discrimination on the job

-- carried the "double burden" of wage work and housework

iv. suburbanization created a female ghetto

b. Feminism re-emerges

i. demographic shift begins in 1957

ii. women respond to civil rights movement

iii. early sign of dissent: Kennedy's President's Commission on the Status of Women (1961) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963)

2. Women's Liberation

a. started in 1967 by female veterans of civil rights and antiwar movements

b. repudiated negative cultural valuation of femininity (Miss America, 1968)

c. introduced principle, "The personal is political," and consciousness raising

IV. Conclusion

A. Black Power provided a model of militancy and cultural affirmation for other oppressed groups

B. Cross-fertilization was a hallmark of the 1960s

C. Next time: the New Left, counterculture, and sexual revolution

D. For now: clips from Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music (1969)

 

 

How does culture become the terrain of revolutionary struggle across a range of social movements in the 1960s?

What parallels do you see between politics and aesthetics in the Black Arts Movement, Women's Liberation, and the Counterculture?

How is generational consciousness relevant to the diverse liberation movements of the 1960s?

 

 

Negro es Bello II, Elizabeth Catlett, 1969
Catlett's image reflects a "modernist-informed African formalism in its idolatry of black physiognomy" (Powell, 18) as well as an effort to formally mediate the often conflicting demands between cultural creation and political commitment (i.e. the repetitive use of the Black Panther Party icon).
(Source: Richard J. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century
[Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1997], 17)

(Cited by Virginia Hiltz and Dr. Mike Sell, The Black Arts Movement, http://www.umich.edu/~eng499/.)

 

Cloth patch with American Indian Movement logo

 

Brown Berets marching in Mexican Celebration Parade, St. Paul.
Photograph Collection 9/15/1972
Location no. GT4.9 p93

FEMALE LIBERATION: A Joint Statement by
Six Female Liberation Groups in Chapel Hill
and Durham, N.C.

Women, throughout the United States, in cities and towns, on campuses, in high schools, and in neighborhoods, are beginning to work together for the first time to eliminate the contradictions in our society between their potential as human beings and the roles of servant and sex object assigned them. The remarkable thing about this “movement” is that it is intentionally without a central organization and without leaders and professional organizers. Yet groups of women are spontaneously organizing. These groups include women of every age, position in society, and political conviction. This is because women are coming to recognize that their problems, even those which appear to be personal, are really problems that they share with other women the result of social conditions and that the solution lies in working together.

What is it that women want? They are working to eliminate the inequities of a system that oppresses groups such as women, blacks, and the poor. Some specific goals are equal education and job opportunities, equal pay for equal work, and the universal child care facilities without which such opportunities would be useless. But these are only part of the overall need for women to be able to freely make the choices which control their lives.

Women realize that their ultimate liberation must go beyond mere legal changes and beyond the so-called "sexual revolution.” The liberation of women, like that of blacks and the poor -- whose struggles women must share -- requires basic changes both in social institutions, like the schools and businesses which do not give equal opportunity, and in the attitudes of men and women. Men will have to give up the privileges granted to them because of their sex, and accept their share of the care of children and the maintenance of the home. When a woman can freely choose her role in society, she is less likely to find her only acceptable role in raising children. Such changes will not only be in the interest of Justice for women, but ultimately for the benefit of all society. Society needs the creative contributions of its female majority.

 

 

From a '70s Gay Liberation Front Poster
(Used on the jacket cover of: Duberman, Stonewall, 1993.)