SEIZE THE TIME

The demand for black power in the late 1960s meant different things to different groups within the black community. For the mildest of its mouthers, the slogan was a call for black economic self-sufficiency and political power within the American system. For others, it meant complete racial separatism and cultural nationalism. For still others, it meant a complete anticapi talist revolution in the Marxist model, except that where Marx thought the revolutionary vanguard would emerge from the industrial working class, Marxist black revolutionaries saw the revolution emerging from the black ghetto underclass. The Black Panthers, who were believed by many to be the most aggressively militant and revolutionary of the black organizations of the period, embraced the latter position.