Frustration Sets In.

As the struggle for rights for African-Americans continued during the 1960s, many activists became convinced that the nonviolent strategies used by the movement in the early years of the decade had reached the limits of their effectiveness. Many blacks expressed frustration that the civil rights movement, as represented by sit-ins and Freedom Rides, did not give them the opportunity to express their anger at racism in America any more than they had been able to in the worst days of Jim Crow. Nonviolent protest, they felt, only gave racists the opportunity to victimize them further; increasingly, black activists wanted to take the rights they had as Americans, rather than waiting to be granted them. In September 1966, for example, after a fleeing black youth accused of auto theft had been shot and wounded by Atlanta police, Stokely Carmichael, an activist and veteran...