I'm Jonathan Capehart and welcome to Capehart. The big dates of the Civil Rights Movement are

1963 for the March on Washington, 1965 for the Voting Rights Act, 1968 for the assassination

of Martin Luther King. But in a new book, former Newsweek Editor and former NBC News Washington

Bureau Chief Mark Whitaker zero-zinn on 1966 in saying it loud, 1966, the year Black Power

challenged the Civil Rights Movement. In this conversation, first recorded for watching

to post live on February 8th, Whitaker argues that 1966, not only forever changed history,

but it also changed the way in which Black Americans viewed their lives, their beauty, and their power.

You specifically zero-in on 1966. What was it about that year that inspired you to write this book?

Well, I started writing this book about the Black Power Movement, and initially I thought

it was going to, the book would span six, seven years, maybe even a decade. But once I started

doing the research and the reporting so much happened in 1966 that we remember the pieces of it,

but I think most people don't realize it all happened in one year. So, Soakley Carmichael

takes over his chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, deposing John Lewis,

and takes it in this much more militant direction. In the middle of the Meredith March through

Mississippi that that summer, he unleashes the chant of Black Power, and all of a sudden it becomes

the thing that everybody's talking about in the press and in Black America. In the fall of 1966,

the Black Panther Party is formed in Oakland, California, led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seal.

It was the year that Martin Luther King tried to take his version of the Civil Rights Movement

North to Chicago and met fierce resistance there. And on the cultural front, it was the year that

Afros became popular, Dishikis. And finally, in December, at the very end of the year,

the first ones that was celebrated in Los Angeles. So, just an amazing amount of things happened

in that one year and that's the story I tell in the book. So, you know, you mentioned two people,

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