Charles V. Hamilton, helped define ‘Black Power,’ dies
Charles V. Hamilton, a self-described academic activist of the Black Power movement whose landmark 1967 manifesto with student organizer Stokely Carmichael reframed the civil rights struggle by calling on Black people to undermine America’s “institutional racism” on their own terms, has died in Chicago at 94.
The death on Nov. 18 — confirmed by his friend, South African professor Wilmot James — was only disclosed recently because of Hamilton’s request for privacy. The news was first reported by the New York Times.
Hamilton did not declare himself a militant or revolutionary, but his views often broke ranks with established groups such as the NAACP or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which sought broad political and multiracial coalitions. Hamilton increasingly stressed the imperative for Black communities and other minorities to take greater control of their own destinies.
His encouragement of Blackled
economic and social development — essentially building new systems alongside existing ones — was portrayed as a counterweight to the racism that he said was embedded in everything from bank lending to law enforcement. Hamilton’s use of the term “institutional racism,” which he popularized, became part of the foundational statements for many Black nationalists and others.
“This directly and specifically means the alleviation of Black dependency,” Hamilton said at Harvard University in 1968. “It is incumbent upon Black people to control their own communities because, if they don’t, somebody else will.”
That philosophy was the core of “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation,” the 1967 book that brought together Hamilton from academia and Carmichael, a firebrand leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights group.
The partnership was a study in contrasts. Hamilton was a pipe-smoking professor who eschewed bombast and often told his students to avoid angry rhetoric and abide by his oft-repeated appeal, “show me your data.” Carmichael (who later took the name Kwame Ture) rose through civil rights street battles and was building alliances with the militant Black Panther Party.
During a protest rally in Greenville, Miss., in 1966, Carmichael gave an electrifying speech in which he called for “Black power.” He did not coin the term, but his speech thrust the idea of Black Power, and its many interpretations, into debates on the direction of the civil rights movement.
“I never wanted to be just a professor,” Hamilton told the Annual Review of Political Science in 2018. “No, that was not it. I wanted to turn my academic life into an activist one.”
The book “Black Power” embraced the goal of nonviolence followed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others. The treatise, however, offered a different vision about how to confront racism and bigotry. Black communities, they wrote, needed to cultivate their own leadership and institutions to show they were equal partners in the country’s future. “Before a group can enter the open society,” they wrote, “it must first close ranks.”
Black power, Hamilton told journalist Studs Terkel in a 1967 radio interview, was a “developmental process” and an attempt to redress long-standing prejudices — not a call for separatism as some critics claimed.