Many abolitionists, and even policymakers, have taken “Defund the Police” literally. Advocates of this idea claim that more police contact with citizens, especially Black Americans, leads to more arrests, more imprisoned, and more harmed and killed. Consequently, defunding the police is a strategy for reaching a world without police (and prisons). Less radical protesters may support redistributing financial resources from police toward community services without seeking to eliminate policing altogether. Meanwhile, many politicians, including presumptive Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders, have come out against defunding the police. Both have argued that problems in policing can be addressed without starving law enforcement of resources whereas abolitionists claim reforms only improve the criminal justice system’s capabilities of harming more people.
Advocates of “Defund the Police” claim that more police contact with citizens, especially Black Americans, leads to more arrests, more imprisoned, and more harmed and killed.
Of course, this is not the first Black-created protest slogan that has caused such debate. “Black Lives Matter” wasn’t the first either. Current debates around “Defund the Police” reminds me of an even older contested political slogan—Black Power.
On June 16, 1966, police in Greenwood, Mississippi, arrested Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman Stokely Carmichael after a dispute over allowing participants in James Meredith’s March Against Fear to set up a campsite at a local school. After leaving jail, Carmichael declared in an electrifying speech, “What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!” While many ideas associated with Black Power (i.e., racial pride and solidarity, self-determination, cultural integrity) had circulated among activists for decades, Carmichael’s call for Black Power launched a new debate about civil rights, Black politics, and liberation.
In Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967), Carmichael and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton advanced a more modest explanation of the term. They stressed the need for Black Americans to reject structural racism, develop racial solidarity, organize around democratic principles, and create their own institutions.
Many radical Black Power activists and organizations heeded Carmichael and Hamilton’s calls for the “search for new forms” of Black politics. The Black Panther Party and the League of Revolutionary Workers sought to synthesize Black Power’s nationalist orientation with Marxist-Leninist anti-capitalist politics. Historian Ashley Farmer has illustrated how Black women such as Frances Beale and Gwendolyn Patton used Black Power as a reference point in their critiques of sexism, racism, and imperialism in an effort to express a more feminist vision of liberation.
The response from critics was quick after Carmichael’s speech. Less than a month later, NAACP President Roy Wilkins denounced the slogan, calling it “antiwhite” and suggesting that it “leads to black death.” The goals of Black Power—and the strategies for achieving them—remained too vague for some. Black leftist Robert L. Allen remarked on its limitations, concluding, “revolutionary rhetoric is no substitute for a thorough analysis upon which a program can be constructed.” Martin Luther King Jr. found “Black Power” too militant. However, in an excerpt of his final book published in June 1967 in the New York Times, King argued for Black Americans to cultivate and exercise their collective power as workers, consumers, voters, and political leaders through massive civil disobedience—a clear engagement of Black Power ideas.