Textbooks and educators often portray the history of African Americans receiving rights as simple and harmonious. The truth being that it was not that simple and many Africans Americans lost their lives for trying to use their “rights.” What some saw as a privilege, others saw as a right. I think that there needs to be a different approach in educating for what really happened during the time of Civil Rights. By looking at historical accounts, personal testimonies, Supreme Court cases, and works of those in the African American community, we can see which most readers don’t see; this is important because we can depict the theme of violence against African Americans and raises the argument between having a right and having a privilege.

First of all, looking at Stokley Carmichael’s “Black Power,” we can see that throughout American history there are a lot of cases of African Americans not being able to use the rights set by the constitution without being attacked. Also, we can see that there is a big correlation between violence against African Americans and the debating of rights versus privilege. Carmichael argues that every man is born free and with being free that things were not a privilege, but a right.  He states that “I could vote and that wasn’t a privilege; it was my right… every time I tried I was shot, killed, or jailed, beaten, or economically deprived” (Carmichael 315). This shows that Africans Americans, men specifically, who tried to perform their civic duty were hurt because they are doing what they rightful are able to do. The Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution “prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude”.” The government thought about how to fix the issue of giving rights to African Americans, but they didn’t take in account so much of how to enforce the Amendment. So, Caucasian males specifically started to go and attack these African American men for trying to vote. They thought that they just had a privilege now and not a right. This extreme tension help create what would be known at the Ku Klux Klan.

The Ku Klux Klan first emerged in the late 1800s and early nineteenth century. They were a group that supported white supremacy and white nationalism. They were known to use violence against African Americans to try and overthrow Republican state governments at the time because supported giving the African Americans rights and didn’t support white supremacy. Looking back at the title of Carmichael’s speech “Black Power,” we can see that he wants us to stir away from white supremacy and focus more attention on the power of blacks. He states “in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom” (Carmichael 314). Carmichael wants us to think that no person can just determine if someone is free or not. I mentioned earlier how he said that ever man is born free and there shouldn’t need to be a rule or law added in the constitution to ensure that blacks have the same rights. I think they do have the right just like every man. No one should need to make any law, it should be assumed that every American Citizen has the same rights and freedoms. It is not a matter of gaining a privilege but it is a right.

Some might bring up the point that if African Americans want to be assumed rights instead of a privilege, that they should stand up for themselves and so something about it. This is the whole idea behind black power in that it is there to help enable black Americans to fight for equality and recognition in society. However, it was not that simple back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. White versus black relations were not as tense during the time period of WWII because they realized they had to treat each other as a unit to accomplish what they needed to for their country. This helped African Americans lose their fear of being beaten or in fear in general of the white population. After WWII relations grew a bit tenser again, but since the African Americans did not fear the white people anymore they started pushing for black power and fight for their rights, not their privileges. There has been documentation in history that show that blacks would gather in groups and organize giant sit ins and venture to places where they were not accepted. This led to numerous arrests and attacks on them, but the fear was bigger in the whites instead of the blacks which only made them weaker and the African Americans stronger.

Stokley Carmichael addresses the claim that these problems of fear in the white communities are not the fault of the Africans Americans, but it is the fact that there is an “incapability of whites to deal with their own problems in their own communities…that is the problem of the failure of the civil rights bill” (Carmichael 315). I think that this is very true, there have been many cases in history were people blame their problems on minorities as a scapegoat to try and direct the issue on someone else. Adding on with own knowledge, I think this could be compared to Adolf Hitler in which he blamed the Jewish people and created a negative stereotype on them. This is exactly what white supremacists did back in the late 19th and 20th century. There was nothing wrong with the black citizens, but just an idea that has been stuck in people’s minds for generations prior to the civil war that slavery was ok and that blacks were violent “savages” or just “property.” 

There were some major influencers that arose during the origins of the Civil Rights movement that tried to speak out for the Black population as a whole and tried to appeal to the general public. One of the most famous influencers of the time period was Martin Luther King Jr. He wrote a letter that appealed to a wide variety of population with his major use of pathos, logos, and ethos.
