Saying It Loud: 1966?The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement

Mark Whitaker “writes with the eye of a journalist and ear of a poet” (The Boston Globe) to tell the story of the momentous year that redefined the civil rights movement as a new sense of Black identity, expressed in the slogan “Black Power,” challenged the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis.

In “crisp prose” (The New York Times) and novelistic detail Saying It Loud tells the story of how the Black Power phenomenon began to challenge the traditional civil rights movement in the turbulent year of 1966. Saying It Loud takes you inside the dramatic events in this seminal year, from Stokely Carmichael’s middle-of-the-night ouster of moderate icon John Lewis as a chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to Carmichael’s impassioned cry of “Black Power!” during a protest march in rural Mississippi. From Julian Bond’s humiliating and racist ouster from the Georgia state legislature because of his antiwar statements to Ronald Reagan’s election as California governor riding a “white backlash” vote against Black Power and urban unrest. From the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, to the origins of Kwanzaa, the Black Arts Movement, and the first Black studies programs. From Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ill-fated campaign to take the civil rights movement north to Chicago to the wrenching ousting of the white members of SNCC.

Deeply researched and widely reported, Saying It Loud offers brilliant portraits of the major characters in the yearlong drama and provides new details and insights from key players and journalists who covered the story. It also makes a compelling case for why the lessons from 1966 still resonate in the era of Black Lives Matter and the fierce contemporary battles over voting rights, identity politics, and the teaching of Black History.

Mark Whitaker is the former editor of Newsweek and the first African American to lead a national newsweekly. He then served as Washington Bureau Chief for NBC News and Managing Editor of CNN Worldwide. Whitaker’s memoir My Long Trip Home was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His social histories Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance and Saying it Loud: 1966—The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement were both named among the best nonfiction books of the year by The Washington Post. 

ISBN: 9781982114138
Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: February 06, 2024

"Whitaker has a journalist’s understanding of the difference between merely documenting the facts and using them to tell a story, and his sober yet crisp prose pulls the reader along with nary a lull.""Excellent. . . . [Whitaker] writes with the eye of a journalist and ear of a poet. . . . A refreshing history of the Black Freedom Struggle during the year when the dominant idea about racial progress transitioned from an emphasis on non-violent direct action toward a demand for Black self-determination, Black consciousness, and Black pride."“I was in high school in 1966, and it felt like the edge of history. In his brilliant new book, Saying It Loud, Mark Whitaker has taken me back there, and the journey is both enthralling and a riveting reminder of the tumult, inspiration, and potent possibilities of the Black Power movement. It's also novelistic in its fully realized human portraits of the movement's backstory. I can't say it any louder: this is not only a compelling read; it's essential for understanding where we started and where we might find lessons in determining where we go from here.”“A fresh take on what Whitaker rightly describes as ‘the most dramatic shift in the long struggle for racial justice in America since the dawn of the modern Civil Rights era.”“The years that Mark Whitaker chronicles in Saying It Loud were years I well knew as a young reporter and also as a Black Southerner who came out of the Civil Rights Movement when much of the complicated (and yes sometimes disturbing) history he delves into was being made. . . . What Saying It Loud provides, especially for the Black Lives Matter generation, is history that will help them avoid the pitfalls of their predecessors as well as a road map to the more perfect union this country has long promised but has not yet achieved."“With surgical precision and poetic verve, Mark Whitaker’s Saying It Loud limns the anatomy of racial chaos, group conflict and organizational convulsion that transformed 1966 into a seminal year of Black resistance. . . . Brilliantly tracks the rise and fall of Black Power and how its lessons echo across the decades and thunder in today’s headlines.”“At once eloquently intimate and bracingly expansive, Saying It Loud is a tour de force. Mark Whitaker has produced a provocatively eloquent and original work of narrative history that inspires us to look upon the past with new eyes.”