There was also an "awakening of Black consciousness on a cultural level," he says. Whitaker writes that it wasn't just the language of the civil rights movement that changed in 1966. "The story gets picked up in 200 newspapers around the country, and all of a sudden, everybody's talking about Black Power." "The next day gets reported by the Associated Press," Whitaker says. Whitaker notes that for years the rallying cry of the civil rights movement had been "Freedom now!" But, he says, on June 16, 1966, Carmichael ushered in a new call to arms - "Black Power!" - during a rally in Greenwood, Miss. Whitaker examines the pivotal year in his new book, Saying It Loud: 1966 - The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement. It's also the year when when Stokely Carmichael replaced John Lewis as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and challenged the tactic of non-violence. Journalist Mark Whitaker says that much of what's happening in American race relations today traces back to 1966, the year when the Black Panthers were founded and the Black Power movement took full form. Listen Stokely Carmichael, shown here in 1967, helped popularize the term "Black Power!" in 1966.
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