Black power movement

The black power movement or black liberation movement was a branch or counterculture within the civil rights movement of the United States, reacting against its more moderate, mainstream, or incremental tendencies and motivated by a desire for safety and self-sufficiency that was not available inside redlined African American neighborhoods. Black power activists founded black-owned bookstores, food cooperatives, farms, media, printing presses, schools, clinics and ambulance services.

The movement was partially inspired by ideologies and individuals who were outside of the United States, such as American expatriates in newly independent Ghana. It also impacted others outside of the United States, such as the Black Power Revolution in Trinidad and Tobago.

By the late 1960s, black power came to represent the demand for more immediate violent action to counter American white supremacy. Most of these ideas were influenced by Malcolm X's criticism of Martin Luther King Jr.'s peaceful protest methods. The 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, coupled with the urban riots of 1964 and 1965, ignited the movement. New organizations that supported Black Power philosophies ranging from the adoption of socialism by certain sects of the movement to black nationalism, including the Black Panther Party (BPP), grew to prominence.

While black American thinkers such as Robert F. Williams and Malcolm X influenced the early black power movement, the Black Panther Party and its views are widely seen as the cornerstone. It was influenced by philosophies such as pan-Africanism, black nationalism and socialism, as well as contemporary events including the Cuban Revolution and the decolonization of Africa.