New Black Power:
Constructive Resilience and the Efforts of African American Bahá'ís

by Derik Smith

About: In 1966, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee stood in Mississippi and raised a call, “What do we want?” A resounding response poured from hundreds of voices, “Black Power!” (Jeffries 171). This was the first time that the two words came together as a public rallying cry, a punctuating symbol in political struggles in the United States. In the decades after Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) led that chant in Mississippi, the slogan “Black Power” became an activist mantra throughout the Black Diaspora. While the assertion that “Black Lives Matter” has moved to the forefront of the activist lexicon in recent years, the idea of Black Pow-er remains potent. Yet our conceptions of Black Power are often limited. This is because our conceptions of power itself are limited. As the Universal House of Justice suggests, we frequently think of power as a “finite entity which is to be ‘seized’ and ‘jealously guarded’” (2 Mar. 2013). But power can be conceived of in different ways; indeed, the Bahá’í approach to social transformation compels us to expand our conceptions of power—Black Power included. We may need to develop new images of power and Black Power especially, as we learn about how individuals, institutions, and communities can use constructive resilience to transform society and respond to social oppression—especially oppression that emerges from racism, “a profound deviation from the standard of true morality” (Universal House of Justice, 22 July 2020).