 Welcome to what promises to be a really enlightening conversation with my old friend and colleague Mark Whittaker, who is the author of Saying It Loud, 1966, the year Black Power challenged the Civil Rights Movement. This book was just published last week. I've read it. It is extraordinarily good. It is extraordinarily timely and an important work of history. So we welcome any questions that those of you in the National Archives or YouTube audience might have. When you pose the questions at a certain point after that, maybe not right away, I will pose them to Mark. Mark is a former editor of Newsweek. He was the first African-American to have a major national news organization, former senior vice president at CNN, and he's held various other titles over the years, Washington Bureau Chief for NBC News. I won't go through his entire resume, but he's the author of several other books, which I also recommend to you. And this one, I think, guarantees Mark's place as an important American historian. So let's just jump right in. Mark, welcome. And I want to ask you, at the top, the National Rights Movement really extended over a period of decades, but you have focused just on one year in the movement. Why? Well, first of all, thanks for that kind introduction. You know, for 10 years before 1966, really there is a pretty consistent through line the objectives of the civil rights movement, the tactics of the civil rights movement, and the leadership of the civil rights movement, starting with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-1956, then going through the sit-in movement, the Freedom Rides, the Birmingham campaign, all the way to the Selma March in 1965. The focus is on passing legislation to address the problems of discrimination and voter suppression. The tactics are nonviolent protest, even in the face of, you know, violent policing and so forth. And the leader recognized within the movement and in the media and around the world is Martin Luther King Jr. In 1966, all of a sudden things change, largely as the result of the restlessness of a young black generation that questioned both the objectives and the tactics. So they, and a lot of them had their experience. There was a part of this generation that I write about who had formed this organization called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, which had gone into the deep south to organize blacks to vote in places where they hadn't been allowed to vote in generations. And that were incredibly violent. That were, you know, the Ku Klux Klan operated with impunity. The police themselves were racist and had sheriff deputies who terrorized black community. And you had a young generation in the north that had, with their families, come from the south over the previous 40 years, 50 years or so, and had grown up in these northern communities that, particularly after World War II, had become increasingly predominantly black and run down once white people moved to the suburbs and urban renewal had really a terrible effect on the economics of those community. And where policing started to feel like more and more of a sort of an occupation, rather than sort of a community policing model. So their experience had been very different. And as a result of their experience, they were posing all kinds of questions. One was, can we, in the face of everything that we confront, that we've seen in the deep south and that we've seen in these northern communities, can we declare that we are going to be unconditionally nonviolent? So they wanted to at least reserve. They weren't initially talking about violent provocation or confrontation, but they were saying that they felt that they had at least the right to defend themselves. So they also were questioning the goal of integration, the vision that Dr. King laid out in the March on Washington when he talked about his dream of a sort of peaceful integrated society. Well, what the young generation was saying is based on our experience, what we've seen is that actually white people aren't interested and there may be some liberal whites who would be willing to integrate and live side by side with well-educated middle-class blacks. But most white people have no interest in integrating with chaircroppers. Most have no interest in integrating with folks who live in these inner-city neighborhoods in the north. So they were raising questions about that. So eventually in the middle of all of this, this whole spirit of questioning and restlessness galvanizes around the slogan of black power and we can talk about how that happened. But really what it is is like for after 10 years, it is a dramatic shift in the tone of the debate. And there is, as I say in the subtitle of the book, a challenge to the sort of orthodoxy of the civil rights movement that had prevailed for a decade. So Malcolm X had been assassinated the year before in 1965. So he kind of began that challenge, although it was tinged with the politics of the nation of Islam and a whole kind of sideshow involving that. But then in 1966, SNCC kind of goes through a very tumultuous period. And so if you could kind of take us through what happened with John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael and where all of that came from and went in the course of just a year. So SNCC was an organization that had informed it really sort of came out of the sit-in movement, the lunch counter sit-in movement, which was started and led by young people. The Ella Baker, a really fascinating and historic figure who I think is known, but perhaps not well known enough, who had been a veteran. She had worked for the NACP. She had worked for King's Organization, the SCLC. But she organized a retreat for these young people and encouraged them to form their own organization. And that became SNCC. And their focus was going into the Deep South, actually to places that even the SCLC wouldn't go, and partnering with local activists on the ground to register predominantly poor blacks to vote. And the leader going into 1966, the chairman of SNCC was John Lewis, of course, who we now remember as the congressmen and sort of sainted figure that he became. He had been active in their early sit-in movement. He had become first famous for giving a speech along with Dr. King at the March on Washington. And then in 1965, he famously gets beaten bloody on the Edmunds Pettus Bridge at the beginning of the Selma march. And he sort of at that point becomes nationally known, sort of famous. And so for the year between Selma, so in 1966, SNCC would have these period, every year they would have a retreat where they would rent some place where they could all gather and talk about their strategy and for what they had planned for the coming year. And then at the end of the retreat, they would have an election to elect their officers for the coming year. And so in the spring of 1966, they held a retreat at a place called Kingston Springs near Nashville. And Louis arrives at, I have a whole chapter in the book just about this retreat and this election. Louis had been traveling in Europe, raising money and giving speeches for SNCC. He arrives at the retreat badly jet-lagged, completely exhausted, but expecting that he's going to be easily re-elected. And at this vote on the last night, he actually is. They have a vote and he wins easily. But there had been, while he was going around giving speeches and raising money, there had been sort of a growing discontent in the ranks with his leadership. Why the people, the more militant factions within SNCC thought that he was too close to Dr. King, that he was too eager to work with President Johnson, who they were very suspicious of, and that he just was distracted with all this travel and so forth. And so a lot on the first vote, even though he won handily, a significant number of SNCC members abstained. And so after that vote, one of the more militant members basically challenged the results of the first vote on the basis of not enough people had voted. So this unleashes this wild debate that goes on through the night to the crack of dawn and then finally gets increasingly acrimonious. People start calling John Lewis' names. He gets quite defensive about the whole thing. And then eventually, literally at the crack of dawn, it's almost like a movie. You can see it in the book. They hold a second vote and he's defeated and Stokely Carmichael has elected the chairman. This, it crushes John Lewis. John Lewis, his whole identity had been tied up with SNCC. He did not see it coming. He accepted the results of the vote and soldiered on for a couple of months before he resigned from SNCC. But it really took him several decades, almost two decades to recover from it. He was really lost at that point. And even when he later ran for Congress and became what we remember him as, he was still quite bitter about it. And in his own memoirs, it just leaps off the page how hurt he was by that experience. So set the stage a little bit for Stokely Carmichael, who was working quite successfully on voter registration particularly in the period right after Voting Rights Act was enacted, which was the year before, but tell people about a little something briefly about Loudoun's County, Alabama, how many African-Americans lived there and how many were allowed to vote before the Civil Rights, before the Voting Rights Act, just to give people some sense of what the challenge was. So Stokely Carmichael was this very charismatic, smart, handsome organizer who had, he was born the Caribbean, but then he spent his formative years in New York. He went to Howard University. He sort of joined the activist movement and then SNCC while he was at Howard. And in the year leading up to 1966 and into 1966, he was the field secretary for SNCC in Loudoun's County, Alabama, which was one of these places in the deep South where blacks were in an overwhelming majority in terms of the population, but not a single black had been allowed to vote or had been able to register to vote in 60 years. And Stokely's view on voter registration was that it only, even after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that in places like Alabama, Mississippi, and so forth, the question was, his question was, how far does the right to vote get us when the only candidates we have to vote for are white supremacist Democrats? These states at the time were controlled by the Democratic Party. They were openly white supremacists. We all know about George Wallace, who was the governor of Alabama at the time. The slogan of the Democratic Party in Alabama literally was white supremacy for the right. So he basically encouraged what he tried to do as sort of an experiment in Loudoun's County was not only to register a critical mass of voters, but then to get them to form their own independent black political party. And he found this kind of obscure Alabama law that laid out the procedure for how to do that. And miraculously, in the course of one year, he not only registered enough blacks in Loudoun's County to make that happen, but they actually held a nominating convention. They nominated their own candidates to run for local offices like Sheriff and for the school board and so forth and so on. And that had all been the nominating convention. And again, it's a pretty dramatic scene in the book. Happens just before this retreat in Kingston Springs when he becomes the chairman. And so when he starts talking in the middle of the summer and we'll get to that about black power, that was what he was talking about at first. It was black political power. I mean, the press started very quickly assuming that it was all about rejecting non-violence. And there was a part of it that became that increasingly. But at the beginning when he talked about black power, what he was talking about is blacks have to use their newfound voting power to elect their own candidates. And what was the logo? Obviously it was not a crazy idea. What was the logo? The mascot, a logo is probably a better word for that party that was then picked up by some folks in Oakland, California. Yeah. So again, under this local law in Alabama, the requirements for starting a new party, parties were required to have symbols, which traditionally had been animals. Why? Because there were so many people in those areas, black and white, who couldn't read. So it was a way for people who were literate or semi-literate to identify which party they were voting for. So was it donkey and elephant for the Democrats and Republicans? Well, actually, so that's where the elephant and the donkey come from. But in Alabama, actually, the Democratic Party, the donkey wasn't good enough for them. So they had adopted a rooster. So the George Wallace Democrat, their symbol was a rooster, and then the slogan was white supremacy for the right. Anyway, so once Sokli had organized this new black political party, the symbol they chose was a black panther. So we all know the name, the black panther, the black panther party, but we associate it with the Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and the black panthers who started out in the West Coast. But actually, the first black panther party was in Lowndes County, Alabama. And what happened was that later in 1966 in the fall, Sokli was invited to give a speech at the University of California in Berkeley. And in advance of that speech, sort of to publicize the speech, a lot of these pamphlets that had been created for the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, the black panther party campaigns in Alabama were brought to Oakland and started to circulate there. And Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, whose names probably most people listening now have heard of, at the time they were part-time community college students in Oakland, California, and who had been involved in activism at that school but were disenchanted with the leaders, the campus leaders at the time. They were looking to form their own organization. And when they saw this panther logo on these pamphlets that were circulating around the Bay Area, they said, hey, that looks pretty cool. We'll just take it. We'll appropriate the symbol. And they did. And so the black panther party that became associated with the black panther party for self-defense started by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale was exactly the same black panther, exactly the same black panther that originally had been adopted in Alabama. And they used California open carry laws, which are very familiar now in other parts of the country, to their advantage. How did that work? So informing their own political party, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, they wrote what is still very well known a document called the 10 point program. So that was sort of their blueprint for what they wanted we're going to try to accomplish. Now, in fact, if you go and read, the whole 10 point program is in my book, and it's really interesting in retrospect because they raise some objectives that are still very much in discussion like reparations and so forth. But the thing that they were really, a lot of it was unrealistic then and now. But the thing, the practical thing that they really plan to do and immediately was to create civilian patrols to monitor police behavior in Oakland. Now, this was also was not a new idea in LA after the Watts riots in 1965. Some local black leaders had created a civilian patrol that had been going around. And what they would do was, they wouldn't confront the police, but they would ride around town and look for situations where police were interacting with black folks in the community. And then they would get out of their cars and they would just sort of stand at a remove across the street or whatever close enough so that the police could see them, just to sort of say to them, look, we're here. So if anything that goes down here between you and these people who you're questioning or whatever will be witnesses. And again, when you think about today, all of these horrific incidents of police violence, that we've been confronted with in recent years that have led to the Black Lives Matter movement. Why do we know about them? We know about them because of cell phones. We know about them because of police body cam. Well, that didn't exist at the time. So essentially these were kind of like human witnesses. That was the idea. But Huey Newton, who was this interesting, largely self-taught guy who had struggled with learning disability problems early in his youth, but it taught himself to read and become a big reader. He discovered he would go into law libraries, you know, at publicly open law libraries and read through California law books, looking for things that, you know, he could be used to the advantage of activists like him. And he discovered that at the time, California had open carry gun laws, which meant that it was perfectly legal, not only to possess, but to carry guns with you in public as long as they were visible. And so his idea was, we're going to take these community patrol, police patrol idea one step further by arming ourselves. So when we show up and stand across the street and are, you know, observing the cops, they'll see that we are armed at the same time. They'll take us more seriously. So California... And so that was, again, you know, that was the original idea of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which, again, today, given everything we're still living with, is not at all a crazy idea. And California, of course, immediately changed its law to prohibit open carry. Yes, as soon as young black men were going around openly carrying guns, a Republican state lawmaker named Don Mulford introduced an act to make that illegal. And it was. It literally happened just within a month. It would be interesting to see whether, in the next couple of years, with a bunch of states now having open carry, whether you'll see young black activists, you know, carrying weapons in public again. Yeah, well, you know, look, I mean, but it, you know, it's really interesting. So as the Mulford Act was being debated in early 1967, a group of Panthers went to Sacramento to the state capitol with their guns, but in their uniforms, you know, Huey Newton and Bobby Seal had one of the, of course, everybody remembers them for their braids and their leather jackets as well. They had this sort of cool uniform. And so they show up and they, and they're, you know, they're photographed. The pictures of them appearing in Sacramento, you know, are in the front pages of newspapers around the country, their TV reports. Now, of course, this horrifies a lot of people in, you know, in white America and the media, but it made them incredibly attract to young blacks around the country. So without actually having to formally create new chapters of the Black Panther Party, Black Panther Party's, you know, local chapters started to spontaneously form with people in places like Chicago, where you grew up and, you know, elsewhere around the country, just adopting their uniform and the name Black Panthers without directly having to. Not just in a year when they requested that the media not call black people Negroes anymore. You saw the beginning of dashikis, all kinds of other things. So talk just for a minute about the cultural changes that were taking root that year. Right. So in addition to all the sort of political shift in the political debate that we've been talking about, 1966 is also the year where there is this sort of outpouring and embrace of what was, they call black consciousness. So, and it ran the gamut from how black people wanted to be identified. So it was a year when in significant numbers, particularly young blacks said, we don't want to be called Negroes anymore. We want to be called black. It was the year when the Afro hairstyle took off and black folks says, you know, we're not going to straighten our hair to look like white hair anymore. And Ebony magazine, which was sort of, you know, sort of ratified that by putting, there was a cover called the natural look. They did a whole cover just on afros. Dishikis became the fashion statement, the African tunics. It was also the year in, at the end of the year when the first flat, first Kwanzaa was celebrated. And a cultural nationalist named Ron Karenga, based in Los Angeles, formed an entire his own movement called us U.S. that was really focused on cultural nationalism, even more than the sort of political dimension. The women's movement was, you know, in full flower at that point, but there were always tensions inside these other movements, the anti-war movement, civil rights movement. Involving women. You mentioned Ella Baker to talk a little bit about both a long forgotten figure in SNCC and also about the role of women in some of the better things that the Panthers did, like these, you know, school lunch program type activities. Yes. So, so the sadly largely unknown figure or not well enough known figure who you're alluding to, it was named Ruby Doris Smith Robinson. Her maiden name was Smith, family name. And then she married a fellow named Robinson and took his name. And she was, she grew up in Atlanta. She went to Spelman College. She became involved with SNCC by essentially tailing around after her older sister who had been one of the early sit-in leaders and she works, goes to work in the, at SNCC headquarters in Atlanta and very quickly becomes the, the more than really an assistant sort of the top aid to the then executive secretary of SNCC, the number two position named Jim Foreman. And Jim Foreman was the guy who really organized SNCC as a functioning organization, created a budget, did fundraising, did the hiring and Ruby Doris really, sort of was key to all of that. She, he gave her a lot of responsibility. She was really as much as he was running the entire organization on a day-to-day basis and was incredibly, she was tough as nails. Everybody who talks about her, you know, very blunt, very efficient, just did not suffer any kind of foolishness. And so in 1966, Jim Foreman had been doing the job for, you know, almost since the beginning of SNCC. He was, he was burned out. He was suffering from ulcers. So he announces that he's going to step down and everybody within the organization agrees that Ruby Doris should replace him. So at this same retreat at Kingston Springs where Stokely Carmichael is elected chairman, she's elected as executive secretary. At this point, she's still in her, you know, 25 years old. She is the highest ranking woman in the entire civil rights movement. And at first, she as Stokely really sort of starts to sort of take SNCC in a more sort of openly militant direction. She supports him. But then, you know, once he really, you know, became a celebrity and was being covered in the media and invited to speak all over the country and getting more and more outrageous in his rhetoric, she saw the effect it was having on fundraising, on morale among the organizers in the field. And by the fall, when the SNCC, the new SNCC leadership has their own sort of mini retreat just for the officers, she writes a memo, a very tough memo that circulates basically talking about the damage that Stokely is doing, his, a lot of, you know, his appearances is doing to the organization and forces him to confront this criticism at the retreat. So she, you know, and then, but tragically, she, at the very beginning of 1967, she felt ill. At first it was a mystery why she was so sick. Ultimately, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and she died in 1967 at the age of 26, you know, leaving behind her husband and a two-year-old child. You know, it's very sad on a human level, but it's also, you know, once you really understand what she had to offer and how respected she was and how tough she was, it's hard to, you know, resist the feeling that, you know, had she lived, perhaps some of the things that happened very quickly to sort of, you know, make SNCC unravel and, you know, might not have happened and that she might have gone on to, you know, be a much more important figure in the Black Power movement and indeed in the entire civil rights, entire civil rights movement. In the meantime, part of that unraveling was expelling white people from SNCC, right? Yes, so 1966, you know, again, you asked why 1966? Well, you know, I, you know, I didn't really, you know, it was only in the course of really starting to do the research and the reporting. My original idea was I was going to do a narrative history of Black Power, but I spent my first year just reporting and doing research and I was still in 1966 and I realized that, like, so much happened just in that one year that there was a book just in that. And so another thing that happened in 1966, it was the year that, and again, it was a story that unfolded over the year. It didn't happen all at once and I sort of, you know, that becomes clear in the book, but it ended with the expulsion of the last white members of SNCC. And SNCC had always been, it was always from the beginning, it was created by young Black activists, it was always, the top leadership was always Black, but in the early days of SNCC, they welcomed white volunteers and there were these white volunteers who joined some of them in the field, went to jail, you know, paid the dues that a lot of the Black organizers did and even more who worked in the Atlanta headquarters and who considered themselves, you know, just as loyal to SNCC as the Black members, but there was this faction within SNCC that beginning in early 1966 started to argue that it was, you know, Blacks had to sort of as a manifestation of this new spirit of Black consciousness and Black pride and Black power that Blacks had to run the organization and it really needed to be an all-Black organization. And at first, both the previous leadership, John Lewis and Jim Foreman, and then even in the early days, Stokely Carmichael kind of rebuffed this faction, but by the end of the year, they prevailed in another wild scene at another retreat at the end of the year at a Black Catskill resort owned by a one-legged cap dancer named Pig Leg Bates. And in another one of these late night votes with lots of people abstaining, they voted to expel the last white members and I talked to one of them, who is a fascinating woman, Dorothy Dottie, Miller Zellner. And I talked to a number, you know, quite a few other people who had been either officially in SNCC or sympathetic to SNCC, white members and supporters who are still alive. And you know, John, there's still incredibly bitter about it. I mean, when you look at the historical significance of that development and you think about the backlash against civil rights at the polls in 1966, which turned out to be a big Republican year just after Johnson's landslide in 1964, and that then shaded over into Nixon's law and order movement his own code words, his Southern strategy before and after he was elected in 1968, if SNCC had not turned anti-white and if it had been truer to the nonviolent part of the coordinating committee, could things have gone differently politically in the United States? Well, you know, it's hard to know for sure, but you know, again, you know, what really the other thing that happened in 1966 and which makes 1966, you know, really an important year, not just in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, but in a turning point in American politics is as you say, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson had beat Goldwater, Barry Goldwater in a historic landslide. The Democrats had veto-proof majorities in the Senate and the House, you know, completely dominant control and you go back and you look at the punditry in 1964 and you know, political columnists and reporters were saying that the Republican Party would take a generation for the Republican Party to recover. Well, it only took two years because in 1966, largely based on what, you know, was called a white backlash against a number of things. So it was partly this new slogan of Black Power and Stokely Carmichael. You had white candidates campaigning, making Stokely Carmichael himself the focus of their campaign. Vote for me because, you know, I'm against Stokely Carmichael. But also, it was the third summer of racial unrest in America's cities that it started in Harlem in 1964 and Watts in 1965. In 1966, there are sort of, they were called riots, but now some people think of them as rebellions. That in places, there was one in Chicago, in Atlanta, in Omaha that year, and in San Francisco, in a neighborhood called Hunter's Point. So some of this change in the sort of political mood, it was driven by all of that, but it's very stark because Newsweek magazine, where both of us worked for many years, was known in those days for its civil rights coverage. And for commissioning, the then editor of Newsweek, Osborne Elliott, was friendly with Louis Harris, the sort of up and coming pollster who had worked for John F. Kennedy. And he commissioned three huge polls in the course of the 60s, in 1963, 1966, and 1969. And Harris, where Harris had separate teams of white and black pollsters who would go out and the black team would talk to black folks and the white team would talk to white folks. And the first poll that they did in 1963 had actually shown signs of progress, hopeful signs in terms of increasing support for civil rights and respect for Dr. King. In 1966, Oz Elliott commissions another poll and it shows like this dramatic and it's just a couple of months after the black power cry becomes, everybody starts talking about that. And all of a sudden you see just the support for the entire civil rights project starts to fall apart and it asks whether black should be protesting even non-violently the white folks in the poll by more than two to one say black shouldn't even be protesting non-violently. And then, so that was kind of the sign of how the mood had shifted. And then by the fall, you see it reflected in the results of the midterm elections when Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California the first time. And the whole last month of the campaign is a debate about whether Stokely Carmichael should be allowed to come and speak at Berkeley, at the University of California, Berkeley. The Republicans capture all these other state houses. They pick up a lot of seats in the house. Even on the Democratic side, the Democratic Party becomes even more white supremacist, less dramatics, who is an out and out supremacist supremacist is elected the governor of Georgia. George Wallace, who was term limited under Alabama law convinced his wife, Lerlene, who was a total political novice to run in his stead and she wins in a bigger landslide than he had ever won. And the publicity around that campaign positions him to run for president in 1968. And Richard Nixon sees all of this and realizes that, you know, he might have another comeback opportunity. And it's really in 1966 that you can see that he starts thinking about running for president. And when he does, two years later in 1968, as you say, his whole campaign is about law and order, which is sort of a, you know, a dog whistle way of talking about race. So I want to turn the conversation to Martin Luther King. I have a personal connection to him because I met him when I was eight years old in 1966. He was, he had moved to a slum on the west side of Chicago to draw attention to problems of poverty and race in the north. And he was raising money for a big rally at Soldier Field. And my parents who were what were called Lakefront Liberals in Chicago had a party for him in his honor. And I, you know, was allowed to stay up late for the party. I got his autograph. It was many years before I understood what was going on that year. And I later, for Newsweek 30 years later, I went to the site of the apartment house, which had been torn down, where he and Coretta Scott King had lived. But what was that all about? What was Martin Luther King doing in the north? And how did it end? So I have two chapters in the book about that. So in 1966, Dr. King decides that he wants to take the civil rights movement to the north and also to broaden the focus to other issues specifically, most importantly, housing. So he chooses Chicago because there's already a group of very well run organized group of activists, black activists group already on the ground in Chicago. He partners with them and announces that he's going to start this campaign in Chicago that the focus is going to be on, it was initially on housing conditions for renters on the west side of Chicago. It later in the second phase becomes about opportunities to buy housing for blacks in white neighborhoods in the city. And he decides that to show how serious he is about this, that he's going to rent an apartment and have his family live part-time in Chicago. Now, it turns out that this is largely for show. They do rent an apartment and they spend a few nights there, but they never really move there. But it ends, it very quickly becomes clear that the conditions in Chicago are very, very different even than the conditions that he confronted in the south. And first of all, he had to contend with Mayor Daly who didn't really appreciate King showing up in Chicago and making in his view him look bad by talking about these terrible conditions for black folks in the city. So there's this, it's not exactly funny, but there's this really sort of interesting interplay between the two of them where they keep, after every time they meet, they hold a press conference and they're sort of taking digs at each other. So Daly is sort of trying to go through the motions of looking like he's working with Dr. King and cooperating, but then also sort of resisting at the same time. And then particularly in the second phase when King starts focusing on fair housing and picketing and holding marches in these white neighborhoods where blacks have been denied the right to even look at houses, let alone buy them. He's met with just this ferociously violent counter-protest, thousands of white Chicagoans showing up in the street hurling rocks and then he himself gets hit in the head with a rock. You can go on YouTube and see some of this footage of all of that. And he described it as as bad, if not worse than things that he had seen in the South. So eventually they sort of grudgingly came to this sort of compromise. It really to sort of study the problem. It was one of those things where just to sort of... In the end King, he sort of declared a victory based on this agreement to study the conditions, but he sort of left Chicago without really having accomplished that much. And for again, for this young black power generation which was watching all of this, and this is why I have two chapters that run it in the book, they were looking at all of this and they were sort of feeling vindicated. They were saying, you see, we were right about the limits of King's strategy. So we got an interesting question in the chat and it goes back to SNCC. Was internal conflict within SNCC centered on questions of principle and was that conflict fully self-created? Did you see evidence of FBI counterintelligence activities generating conflict in SNCC? Yes, so all of the above, but there's a whole chapter just on that issue of the FBI. There had not actually been... The FBI, it's well known that there had been a lot of surveillance of Dr. King before 1966, but there had not been that much focus on SNCC until Stokely became the chairman and started talking about black power. Then all of a sudden, President Johnson starts asking these questions in phone calls and so forth with the records of his phone calls. Who is this guy Stokely Carmichael? What is black power and so forth? And he orders up his own personal weekly briefing from the FBI on the activities of Stokely Carmichael. And all of a sudden the FBI starts providing this for him and you can track it. I went through the FBI files and so forth. And at first, for the first few weeks of this, it's pretty innocuous stuff. It's just clippings from newspaper accounts of speeches he was giving. But by the fall, they start digging up all this dirt on him, psychological evaluations that had been done for him when he had been evaluated for draft status. And anyway, so there's definite evidence of the FBI starting to not to gather information but to sort of so discontent within SNCC against Carmichael. This later gets expanded starting 1967 to the Panthers. They do even more with the Panthers turning Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver against each other, turning the Panthers against this Karenga movement in LA that I talked about. So all of that was very real. At the same time, there was also just real personality clashes, clashes about strategy, but also about execution within SNCC. And I talked about the disputes between Stokely Carmichael and Ruby Doris Robinson, between John Lewis and the new leadership of SNCC. So that played a role as well. So when you're talking about the infiltration in 67, I think you said, was that the COINTEL program or was that actually a little later? No, no, no. So that's the COINTEL program. Well, that had existed but a specific campaign aimed at black activists groups. That was 1967. And J. Edgar Hoover himself, sometimes J. Edgar Hoover, he was behind these things, but he didn't have his fingerprints on it. But in 1967, he sends his own personal directive to the field of offices, the FBI, say we have to do everything we can to prevent the emergence of a new black messiah, by which he meant a leader who could really sort of be seen as a leader of all black America. In a way, recognizing in a way that King was no longer that figure, particularly for young people. And then after King's assassination in 68, the whole focus gets on, becomes the black power leaders and particularly the Panthers. So for anybody who's seen the movie about Fred Hampton, the very charismatic Panther leader who was essentially assassinated by the police, I think it was in 1969. The title of that film is Judas and the Black Messiah. The Messiah is a reference to Hoover's that Hoover memo. And the Judas was an informant that the FBI had cultivated within the Panther chapter in Chicago, which provided the police with essentially the blueprint to his apartment, which is how they were able to break in there in the middle of the night and shoot him dead in front of his pregnant. Right, my girlfriend. So I think we're going to end on this very good question which projects into the future from 1966. How do you think the most effective means of bringing about change differ now from 1966? Well, you know, I thought a lot about this and it's one reason I actually wrote the book is I sort of was looking for sort of what are the lessons today for activism. I would say there was a couple. So one is just about messaging. You know, slogans like Black Power and today Black Lives Matter, they're very powerful in capturing the spirit and sort of, you know, sort of becoming kind of a rallying point for movements, for getting press attention and so forth. But you have to be able to really explain what you're trying to achieve. And one of the things I show in the book is that, you know, Stokely Carmichael in particular was sort of missed some really important opportunities to do that when he was booked on shows like Meet the Press and Face the Nation and so forth. So again, you think about today, defund the police and so forth. You have to, because if you use this, you know, if you have these kinds of slogans and you're not very clear in what you mean and what your actual policy objectives are, you know, your opponents are going to use them against you. Right? So that's one lesson. I think unity, obviously, you know, there's always politics and infighting, you know, within these movements, but you know, it does hurt. I mean, you know, it hurt the Black Power movement in the 60s and to the degree that that's still true, it's, you know, it can hurt activism today. And then the last thing is really about leadership, right? So, you know, the early SNCC organizers didn't think they needed a leader, you know, and there were a lot of people who thought once John Lewis and then Stokely Carmichael started getting all this attention that was unhealthy. Today, you know, I've interviewed Alicia Garza, who's one of the founders of Black Lives Matter. She says, we don't want a leader. Everybody can be a leader. Well, my view is that if you look at the lessons of 66, but also of other, you know, historic social activist movements and movements for political and social change around the world, what you see is that, you know, what you really need is you need grassroots, you know, boots on the ground, energy and enthusiasm. But you also need, you know, smart, clear, strategic leadership and figures who not only people will follow, but will be recognized by your opponents, by the press, by, you know, as the people they can go to, to, you know, to have what you're trying to achieve explained. And to me, one of the great sort of tragic ironies of the year 1966 is you mentioned Malcolm X, who was assassinated in 1965. Despite the fact that he, you know, had been, he had been dead for a year, he looms over this entire year. All of these, all the people I write about in my book looked up to him, thought they were carrying on the fight that he had begun. But, you know, they were kids, you know, they were not as, and I think had he lived, he's the one person who, for a generation that was no longer willing to listen, take direction from Dr. King, they would have taken direction from him. When you look at how he had evolved in the last years of his life, I think he would have channeled their energy and their impatience and this new spirit of militancy, I think, in a more constructive, in a more constructive direction. Well, we'll never know. We won't know what would have happened if Martin Luther King had not been assassinated a couple years later in 1968. The book is called Saying It Loud, 1966, the year Black Power challenged the civil rights movement. The author is my friend Mark Whitaker, thanks to the National Archives, and thanks to all of you for watching. I'm Jonathan Alter. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, John.