Black Power in Redfern (Gary Foley, 2001)

Black Power was a political movement that emerged among African-Americans in the United States in the mid-1960s. The concept sought to express a new racial consciousness, and Robert Williams, of the NAACP, was the first to put the actual term to effective use in the late 1950s. Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael also had major roles in the formation of the ideas of Black Power. Malcolm X inspired a generation of black activists throughout America and beyond, whilst Carmichael ‘made Black Power more popular, largely through his use of the term while reorganizing the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee  so that whites would no longer possess leadership responsibilities.’  The term was catapulted into the Australian imagination when the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League under the leadership of Bruce McGuinness and Bob Maza who, galvanized by the same notions as Malcolm and Stokely, 1968 invited a Caribbean activist and academic, Dr. Roosevelt Brown, to give a talk on ‘Black Power’ in Melbourne…