June 16, 1966, isn’t on the commemorative calendar in black American politics, but it probably should be. On that date, Willie Ricks, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary, and Stokely Carmichael, SNCC’s new national chair, electrified the crowd in Greenwood, Mississippi, on the March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, when they began chanting “Black Power! Black Power!” The chant—and Carmichael’s speech before the gathering—sent shock waves through the news cycle. I remember that galvanizing moment very clearly; I was then a 19-year-old college student and felt a powerful rush from two snippets of the chant I heard in the press coverage of the moment when Black Power was born, as both a slogan and a movement. It seemed to offer, or augur, an exciting new brand of radicalism, and revolutionary confrontation, in the movement’s next phase.

For all that initial excitement, however, Black Power was always a concept in search of its object. It condensed a variety of frustrations and aspirations, both evanescent and concrete, and suggested, in adumbrated form, a path toward addressing them. So the following year, when Carmichael and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton published the nascent movement’s much-anticipated manifesto, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, the effort to tease out an agenda for Black Power was likely to disappoint nearly every interested party. But the book was also underwhelming in a way that might have been instructive. Even though it was sprinkled with radical-sounding references to domestic colonialism and militant pronouncements purporting to expose the depth and overwhelming extent of American racism, the book alighted on a surprisingly conventional position. At bottom, it advanced, under a radical nameplate, the familiar pursuit of ethnic interest-group politics, of the sort that had shaped pluralist debate over a supposed politics of assimilation since Horace Kallen invented cultural pluralism in the early twentieth century.

“Black Power … is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community,” the authors averred. “It is a call for black people to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations.” But when they laid out the political strategy that followed from this declaration, it was little more than an affirmation of basic ethnic pluralism—“Traditionally, each new ethnic group in this society has found the route to social and political viability through the organization of its own institutions with which to represent its needs within the larger society…. Italians vote for Rubino over O’Brien; Irish for Murphy over Goldberg, etc.”—jazzed up with a race-reductionist account of the history and sources of black inequality. And their brief against American racism centered mostly on the psychological damage that they maintained it perpetrated on black people.

In other words, Carmichael and Hamilton based their purportedly revolutionary Black Power program on the two most problematic—historically inaccurate, racialist, and fundamentally conservative—frameworks that postwar American scholars and policymakers had adopted for interpreting inequality: ethnic succession theory and, with respect to blacks in particular, historian Daryl Michael Scott’s “damage thesis.” Both frameworks eschewed discussion of the role of political economy in favor of airy, group-based claims about culture as the basis for economic mobility and inequality in American life. The outlook conveyed in the particulars of the Black Power program stems in no small part from the political conditions that first gave rise to the movement. Black Power emerged at the moment when the great civil rights victories had been won and the institutional spine of the white supremacist regime had been broken. At that juncture, the broad movement for social justice launched a crucial debate over how best to build upon these foundational victories. In early 1965, longtime labor and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin laid out one vision. He questioned whether it made sense to continue describing the struggle for black equality as “the civil rights movement” in light of its recent landmark achievements. What had to happen after the successful battle for formal equality under the law, Rustin argued, was a move “beyond race relations to economic relations.” Progress toward substantive quality couldn’t happen, he insisted, “in the absence of radical programs for full employment, abolition of slums, the reconstruction of our educational system, new definitions of work and leisure. Adding up the cost of such programs, we can only conclude that we are talking about a refashioning of our political economy.”

Just three months after the movement launched, Rustin directly criticized the priorities of Black Power. He flatly debunked the ethnic group succession narrative as a just-so story that had no bearing on black experience or, for that matter, any other in the United States. He also stressed that the union movement and New Deal redistributive policies had been the main engines of upward mobility for all Americans, black as well as white. He invoked the $100 billion program that A. Philip Randolph was about to publish in A “Freedom Budget” for All Americans. This approach would be “aimed at the reconstruction of American society in the interests of greater social justice,” Rustin argued—and then charged that “the advocates of ‘black power’ have no such programs in mind; what they are in fact arguing for (perhaps unconsciously) is the creation of a new black establishment.”