The Search for Black Power in the Sixties

Abstract

This chapter opens with Reddick’s 1960 trips to Ghana and Nigeria to celebrate their independence alongside his friends Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and St. Clair Drake. The chapter’s focus, however, is Reddick’s role in the evolving civil rights movement of the 1960s. His ongoing mentorship of Martin Luther King Jr., along with his continued strategic planning and public-relations work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, helped that vanguard organization successfully navigate its most tumultuous decade and force passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The chapter also challenges the simple dichotomy between civil rights and Black Power by using Reddick’s diverse activities—including his leadership of Leon Sullivan’s Opportunities Industrialization Center Institute—to explain the many roots and routes of Black Power as it evolved organically out of the southern struggle and parallel ones in the North. Reddick also continued to confront racism in an array of institutions including publishing, where he sought change by coauthoring a young adult’s history of African Americans’ role in the Civil War and Reconstruction entitled Worth Fighting For (1965).