The Black Lives Matter movement today is the same as the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
That is what Peniel E. Joseph, author of “Stokely: A Life” said to a packed University Center room of more than 160 people on Thursday after receiving the Benjamin Hooks Institute National book award.
Stokely Carmichael was the civil rights leader credited with coining the term “Black Power,” which Joseph said is still relevant in 2016.
“We really are in a Stokely Carmichael Black Power movement right now, and it’s a moment that impacts us at the local, regional, national and global level,” Joseph said.
Joseph, the founder of “Black Power Studies,” a subfield of civil rights history, began the lecture with 10 years worth of black history, reflecting on the works of Martin Luther King Jr., the Freedom Riders and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
He then moved onto how Carmichael fits into the history of the civil rights movement.
Carmichael was born on June 29, 1941, in Trinidad, and moved to America to become one of the most prominent leaders during the Civil Rights Movement.
He promoted the Black Power Movement, became a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and allied himself with the Black Panther Party.
“I’ve made it my life mission to talk about Black Power unapologetically, to talk about Stokely Carmichael and link (him) to the public policy and racial and class and economic crisis that we face in the United States today,” Joseph said.
Joseph, who is a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas, spent 25 years studying Carmichael’s life before writing the book that came out in 2014. He said Carmichael is significant in history, but because Carmichael was a revolutionary, he will never get his picture on a postage stamp or have a holiday named after him.
Joseph said Black Power and the Black Lives Matter movement, which was launched after the 2014 shooting of an African- American man in Ferguson, Missouri, are one in the same.
“Someone says ‘Black Lives Matter,’ and people say all lives matter,” Joseph said. “It’s deeply problematic that in 2016 many Americans don’t understand that ‘Black Lives’ is a universal term.”
