BLACK POWER, the advent of black American pop culture

In 1966, a 25-year-old African-American student, Stokely Carmichael, used the term “black power” for the first time, which cannot be reduced to a political prism alone. Black Power is a whole culture, vast, in its own right. It is expressed in different forms, in literature, via figures like James Baldwin or Maya Angelou, the visual arts, from Kerry James Marshall to Jamel Shabazz, on the small and big screen, thanks in particular to Blaxploitation or Spike Lee, as well as in music, a crucial vector.

From Sam Cooke, who announced A Change Is Gonna Come in 1964 to Aretha Franklin, who demanded Respect, NWA who launched Fuck tha Police … soul, jazz, hip-hop, house and funk have helped to carry the voices of black Americans in tense if not discriminatory contexts. Witness Muhammad Ali's refusal to go to Vietnam, Tommie Smith's raised fist at the Mexico Olympics in 1968; witness today the wave of protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd. Following a chronological thread, divided between sociocultural status reports, chronicles of records, films, books and essential works of art, portraits or short stories of legendary events, Black Power offers a “pop culture” panorama over more than fifty years, from the fifties to the present day, from Nina Simone's Mississippi Godam! to today's Black Lives Matter.

Sophie Rosemont