Black nationalist activism revolves around social, political, and economic empowerment of black communities and people, especially to resist assimilation into white culture (through integration or otherwise) and maintain a distinct black identity.
Achieving major national influence through the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Black Power movement of the 1960s, proponents of black nationalism advocated economic self-sufficiency, race pride for African Americans, and black separatism. Reacting against white racial prejudice and critical of the gap between American democratic ideals and the reality of segregation and discrimination in America, in the 1960s black nationalists criticized the methods of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and other organizations that sought to reform American society through nonviolent interracial activism. In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King described himself as standing between the forces of complacency and the “hatred and despair of the black nationalist” (King, 90)King remained fundamentally opposed to black nationalists’ rejection of American society as irreparably unjust and to later black nationalists’ abandonment of nonviolence. Because of their view that “American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within,” King felt black nationalist movements rejected “the one thing that keeps the fire of revolutions burning: the ever-present flame of hope” (King, Where, 44; 46).
