Word: spirited
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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AFTER the slogan "Black Power" was chanted on a Negro march through Mississippi in 1966, it came to signify a new spirit of defiance at one edge of the campaign for civil rights. Among whites and moderate Negro leaders alike, the concept inspired fears of a procession of hot summers, a raging Negro separatist movement-and perhaps in the end a costly showdown between black and white that might send U.S. race relations all the way back to the post-Reconstruction period. The new movement quickly developed its list of fanatical leaders: Stokeley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Ron Karenga...
...attitude of Negroes-even the moderate Negro leaders-who were desperately opposed to the violent and separatist nature of the new crusade. What has clearly developed from this change is a Black Power movement set on a more respectable base, which at its best is in the spirit of what Frederick Douglass was advocating more than a century ago. The most intelligent spokesmen for the new attitude think of it in terms of Black Consciousness-or, more completely, of Black Pride...
There are some who read this voluntarily segregationist spirit as an expression of the Negro's desire to separate from the society that segregates him. This same theory holds that Black Power is a self-destructive force, a prisoner of its own wrath, a rebellion that is against everything and for nothing. According to this interpretation, the Black Power movement has retired the civil rights movement, which from the beginning depended heavily on white strategy and leadership...
...that slavery taught to the self-sufficiency that lies still over a distant hill. The black is learning how to be black, rather than a carbon-copy white. And the pride, the new Negro institutions, the black cooperatives and the black student groups are all testimonials to his new spirit of independence. They will pass as the need for them declines, and as the Negro develops the respect for himself that will embolden him to demand the same respect from all of society...
...scene, they dominate the play perceptibly and strike plangent chords of passion and pity. Clytemnestra is the first to learn of her raddled husband's purpose. She spews at him the clotted venom of years of pent-up hate in a bad marriage; yet what chokes her spirit is anguish for her child...