Building “Audacious Power” on Capitol Hill

While the civil rights movement was the transformative experience for many Members, lawmakers elected in this era were also influenced by a different and, at times, competing political culture. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many African Americans had begun to question the usefulness of the push for integration and the nonviolent, civil disobedience methods of the civil rights movement. “Black Power” began to compete with the previous decade’s “Freedom Now” philosophy.

Black Power had different meanings among its supporters, yet advocates shared a common set of beliefs, including racial and cultural pride, community self-improvement, Black institutional control, international perspectives, and the right of Black self-determination. “When black people lack a majority, Black Power means proper representation and the sharing of control,” wrote two of the movement’s most influential thinkers. “It means the creation of power bases, of strength, from which black people can press to change local or nation-wide patterns of oppression—instead of from weakness.”¹⁶

The phrase “Black Power”—and the movement behind it—was controversial from the moment SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael demanded it at a Greenwood, Mississippi, rally in June 1966. John Lewis, who resigned from SNCC in July 1966, viewed Carmichael’s provocative rhetoric as divisive, saying it created tensions “both within the movement itself and between the races. It drove people apart rather than brought them together.”¹⁷

The struggle for greater political power was one area in which the interests of the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement aligned. Protecting and expanding voting rights was central to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. At a speech following the March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. explained that the “denial of the right to vote” was the “very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland.” “Let us march on the ballot boxes,” he continued, “until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress, men who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.” Black Members of this era were both participants and beneficiaries of the struggle to expand Black political power in the 1960s. And as these men and women entered Congress, they brought with them ideas, strategies, and goals developed by both the civil rights and Black Power movements.¹⁸

Speaking on the House Floor on March 29, 1966, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York outlined what he called his “Black Position.” In many ways Powell anticipated the balance between civil rights and Black Power that would influence future Black congressional politics. In this speech, Powell called on “Black leadership” to “differentiate between and work within the two-pronged thrust of the black revolution: economic self-sufficiency and political power.” Powell wanted Black Americans to develop their own institutions. “We must turn inwardly toward our homes, our churches, our families, our children, our colleges, our neighborhoods, our businesses, and our communities,” he said. But he also recognized the need for Black political integration into the existing establishment. “As chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, I control all labor and education legislation. This is legislative power.” “Black people,” Powell wrote, “must seek audacious power.” A year later, in 1966, Powell, attempting to harness the popularity of the Black Power movement, held a Black Power conference in the Rayburn House Office Building, but nothing came of any larger Powell-led movement.¹⁹

Following Powell’s lead, several of the newly elected Black Members of Congress adopted the rhetoric and practices of the Black Power movement. Often these lawmakers defined Black Power in expansive terms. During a speech at Howard University shortly after she took office, Shirley Chisholm of New York echoed the message in Powell’s “Black Position” thesis. “Consolidating and using our power and our efforts to move up and we want the world to know that it is ‘black power’ because we have learned what other groups have been learning and doing for a long time,” explained the first Black woman elected to Congress. “Until we can organize to create black unity with an economic base. Until we can develop a plan for action to achieve the goals to make us totally independent and not have to look to the man in order to live, we are not liberated.” Bill Clay was quick to distance himself from Black nationalists who argued for racial separation, but he also explained that “Black Power is a combination of black pride and black politics. I’ve devoted my life to this and to the causes of freedom.”²⁰

It was a tragic coda to the Black freedom movement of the 1960s that Black politicians gained political power in American cities at the moment that public and private disinvestment devastated the economic base of many city neighborhoods. Those same difficult circumstances, however, helped set the direction and tone of Black politics, encouraging lawmakers to blend ideas of Black institutional control, pride, and self-reliance with their other objectives of full American citizenship. It shaped their approach to their place in Congress as well.

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