Two words that shaped the civil rights movement

I’m in Greenwood, Mississippi today for a rally to commemorate the 50th anniversary of an event that marked a major turning point in the civil rights movement: a speech by Stokely Carmichael in which he called on his fellow African Americans to demand and achieve “Black Power.”

Carmichael said in the speech—delivered to a crowd of hundreds at Broad Street Park in an African American neighborhood known as Baptist Town—that what black people needed was not “freedom now,” as urged by Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but the power to shape their own destiny.

After leveling a blistering attack on the Mississippi state justice system, Carmichael shouted to the crowd that “what we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” Then Willie Ricks, a principal organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, jumped onto the platform yelling, “What do you want?”