“Black Power — Westernizers and Traditionalists in African American Culture. The Prehistory of the Black Panthers.”

“Black Power — Westernizers and Traditionalists in African American Culture. The Prehistory of the Black Panthers.”
Part One of Shura Burtin’s Lecture

The rise and destruction of the Black Panther Party is perhaps the most dramatic and certainly the most controversial episode in African American history. The Panthers became the culmination of a long and painful story of racial conflict. The FBI considered them the greatest threat to national security. For young America, the Panthers were an embodiment of a dream — no less than the Beatles or Bob Dylan. And in their evolution — from participants in nonviolent marches to those branded as terrorists — lies the full drama of the 1960s.

In the first part of the lecture, we will discuss the prehistory of the Black Panthers — the “Westernizing” and “nativist” traditions in African American social thought (Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X), the Civil Rights Movement, the evolution of the SNCC, and the birth of the idea of “Black Power.”