On 21 February, Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City before about 400 members of his Organization for Afro-American Unity. |
||
On 25 February, the FBI removes Malcolm X from its Security Index. |
||
On 25 March, Martin Luther King, Jr. and about 3,200 marchers reach the state capital in Montgomery, AL, having left Selma four days before in protest of the denial of voting rights for African Americans. |
||
In August, bloody race riots occur in Watts, a Black neighborhood of Los Angeles. More than 35 people are killed, 900 are injured, and 3,500 arrested. Property losses exceed $225 million. |
Huey Newton and Bobby Seale organize the Black Panther Party to promote revolutionary change in the United States. |
||
In May, Harvard graduate Stokely Carmichael is elected chairperson of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). |
On 12 July, rioting broke out in some Black neighborhoods in Newark, NJ. Within a span of four days, about 26 people were killed, 1,500 injured, and 1,000 arrested. |
||
Race rioting occurs in Detroit on 22 July. Some 43 peopleBlacks and whitesare killed, and 2000 injured. Property damage is estimated at $250 million. |
The Black Power movement effectively ends when the coalition between the Black Panthers and SNCC is dissolved. |
||
On 4 April, Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, TN. A week of race riots followed his death in at least 125 American cities. |
In this year, American voters elected 1,185 African Americans to political office in contrast to some 280 people only five years before. |
As the U.S. population reached some 204,000,000, census figures reveal that some 22,500,000 people, or 11% of the population, are of African American ancestry. |
||
The Last Poets cut "Niggers Are Scared of Revolution" for their Last Poets LP. |
The Reverend Jesse Jackson founds a new economic-political organization, which he calls People United to Save Humanity (PUSH). |
On July 25, The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, where Blacks were used as guinea pigs in syphillis experiments, admitted to by US government officials. |
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that interracial marriages rose 63% during the decade of the 60s, with marriages between white men and Black women declining and unions between black men and white women growing. |
Muhammad Ali, boxing champion and associate of Malcolm X, is named the Associated Press Athlete of the Year. |
JD Kool Herc begins working out of a club at 180th Street and Jerome in New York City, where he specializes in short break sections of records. His activity spawns a dance genre, whose participants are labeled "B-boys" or "break boys." |
DJ Afrika Bambaataa hosts a party at the Bronx River Community Center in New York City, an event attended by the Zulusa gang more interested in music and dance than street crime. |
Alex Haley, collaborator with Malcolm X on The Autobiography of Malcolm X, has his bestseller Roots produced on ABC. The miniseries garners the largest audience of any network program in the history of television. |
A rap festival is held in the Audubon Ballroom, the site of the assassination of Malcolm X some thirteen years earlier, in which Grandmaster Flash, The Furious Four, and Lovebug Starski receive top billing. |
Sylvia Robinson, founder of All Platinum Records and Sugarhill label, forms the Sugar Hill Gang rap group, whose "Rapper's Delight" becomes hip hop's first big hit recording. |
Molefi Kete Asante publishes Afrocentricity (African World Press), which effectively mounts a challenge to the Eurocentric view of history. |
According to the National Urban League's annual report, African Americans constitute 11.2% of employed people in the U.S., and 22.3% of the unemployed. |
Bell Hooks publishes Ain't I a Woman, a tour de force in American feminist scholarship. |
After an emotionally and racially charged campaign, Harold Washington is elected mayor of Chicago. |
||
Henry Louis Gates Jr. discovers the 1859 Harriet Wilson's manuscript Our Nig, which he says is the first novel written by an African American woman. |
||
Jesse Jackson announces that he is running for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. |
||
Malcolm X posthumously collaborates with Keith LeBlanc on "No Sell-Out" on No-Sell Out. |
The furor over Jesse Jackson's reference to New York City as "Hymietown," during which Louis Farrakhan of the NOI condemns African American reporter Milton Coleman for reporting the story, weakens Jackson's support among many whites and strengthens the NOI's position especially among younger African Americans. |
||
Many African Americans picket the embassy of South Africa in protest of apartheid, and Bishop Desmond Tutu wins the Nobel Peace Prize. |
||
According to the Wall Street Journal, Russel Simmons, later of Def Jam, is the "mogul of rap." |
The Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan delivers a moving speech to 25,000 people at New York City's Madison Square Garden. |
The rapid spread of crack throughout the United States alters life in America, and trends of nihilism and materialism pervade the African American youth culture. |
||
Anthony Davis and Thulani Davis's opera about Malcolm X debuts with the New York City Opera. |
||
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is declared a national holiday in the U.S. |
Toni Morrison publishes Beloved, and becomes one of America's most revered Black writers along with Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Morrison will win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, and which give life to essential aspects of African American reality. |
||
Hip hop KRS-One poses with an Uzi machine gun on the cover of By All Means Necessary in homage to the photo of Malcolm X holding a rifle outside his home in Queens after it was firebombed in 1965. |
||
Sales of The Autobiography of Malcolm X reach new heights, and eventually will reach over 3,000,000 copies. |
||
PBS Television releases its six-part documentary on the civil rights struggle, Eyes on the Prize, which features segments on Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. |
Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is released by Def Jam Records. |
||
As a result of increased Black-on-Black violence, Ann Carli and Nelson George work toward putting together a consortium of hip hop artists, eventually calling itself Stop the Violence Movement after a song written by rapper KRS-One. |
The Stop the Violence Movement realizes "Self-Destruction" on MLK Day, and the record will go on to sell half a million copies and raise $600,000 for the National Urban League. |
||
Spike Lee's classic Do the Right Thing opens at the Cannes Film Festival, France. |
Nelson Mandela travels to the U.S., which has wide-ranging effects in the African American community. |
||
Paris's "Break the Grip of Shame" is released on The Devil Made Me Do It |
||
X-Clan's "Funkin' Lesson" on To the East Blackwards hits the charts. |
||
Public Enemy releases "Welcome to the Terrordome" on Fear of a Black Planet. |
Cornel West's The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism propels this Princeton professor to the high ranks of American philosophers. |
Spike Lee releases his film version of the life of Malcolm X. African American activist Amiri Baraka leads protests against the film . |
Mandela and de Klerk are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their leadership towards a democratic South Africa. |
In South Africa's first multiracial elections in April, Nelson Mandela is elected President, instituting black majority rule. |
Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, rises to the height of his influence as the most prominent organizer of the "Million Man March" of African-American men in Washington, D.C. |
Makaveli's (Tupac Shakur) "Blasphemy" is posthumously released on Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory. |
On June 23, Dr Betty Shabazz, civil rights activist and wife of Malcolm X, dies. |
On 16 October, Boston Mayor Tom Menino signs a document to place the house in which Malcolm once lived on Boston's list of historic sights. |
Malcolm X's daughters Attallah, Qubilah, Malaak, and Illyasah Shabazz attend the dedication ceremony of the Malcolm X postage stamp. |
Ghostface Killah releases "Malcolm" along with other tracks on Supreme Clientele. |
The Malcolm X Research Project is established at Columbia University of New York under the direction of Manning Marable. |