Page 22 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

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BLACK POWER
SOURCES: Edwin and Michael Emery, The Press and America, sixth edition, 1988;
Sidney Kobre, Development of American Journalism, 1969; Fred Marbut, "The United
States Senate and the Press, 1838-41," Journalism Quarterly, Summer 1951.
Guido H. Stempel HI

BLACK, HUGO (1886-1971) was a U.S. Supreme Court justice selected by
President Franklin Roosevelt in 1937. He is known for his strict interpretation
of the First Amendment, thus believing that the federal government should not
make any laws impeding free speech.
Black did not have a formal law degree, but rather a degree from a junior
college in Alabama, his boyhood home. He did manage to run a small, but
unsuccessful, law firm. He also had ties to the Ku Klux Klan to help his social
standing among those in his community. Despite this, he was elected to the U.S.
Senate for two terms before becoming a justice, a position he held for 34 years.
He was, with the possible exception of his colleague Justice William Douglas,
the strongest supporter of the First Amendment in the history of the Court.
SOURCES: Leonard W. Levy, Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, 1994; The
Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, 1992; Melvin Urofsky,
The Supreme Court Justices, a Biographical Dictionary, 1994.
Jacqueline Nash Gifford

BLACK PANTHERS is considered to be the most militant black power move-
ment in the United States. Known for its violence, the group sought to bring
the issues of black America to the nation's mind during the 1960s and 1970s
through a show of force against white bureaucracy. Memorable skirmishes took
place between the Panthers and the police in California, New York, New Jersey,
and Illinois.
In 1966, the Black Panther Party, on which the Black Panthers is founded,
was created by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The group's philosophy was
based on improving housing, jobs, and education and insisting upon fairer treat-
ment in the judicial system. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), then
headed by J. Edgar Hoover, followed the activities of the group to curtail their
violent tendencies.
Eventually, the group split into two subgroups, one on the East Coast and the
other on the West Coast. The more militant branch (East Coast) was lead by
Eldridge Cleaver, and the other by Newton and Seale. The latter group continued
the efforts of the original Black Panthers minus the violence.
SOURCE: John W. Smith, The Urban Politics Dictionary, 1990.
Jacqueline Nash Gifford

BLACK POWER is an expression created by black militant leader Stokely
Carmichael during the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Carmichael, then president
of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), created the phrase
to describe the activities of "the political left who became frustrated by the