This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross. Much of what is happening in American race relations today

traces back to the pivotal year of 1966, writes my guest, Mark Whitaker. He says it's the year the

black power movement took full form, Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the slogan black power,

became chair of the student nonviolent coordinating committee known as SNCC, and began to redirect

SNCC's focus from peaceful voter registration in the south to a more sweeping and radical

agenda that questioned nonviolence, mainstream politics, and white alliances. Whitaker says it's also

the year the black Panther Party was founded, and the year Martin Luther King struggled to bring

his southern nonviolent integrationist strategy to the urban north in Chicago. It was a year in which

the black arts movement flourished, and the year of the first push for an African American studies

program. Black studies has special significance in Whitaker's life. His father, Sil Whitaker,

was the first chair of the African American studies program at Princeton University. He taught it

other universities as well. Whitaker is the author of the new book, Saying It Loud, 1966,

the year black power challenged the civil rights movement. He's the former managing editor of CNN

Worldwide, served as the Washington Bureau Chief of NBC News, and was a reporter and editor at

Newsweek, becoming the first African American leader of a national newsweekly.

Mark Whitaker, welcome to Fresh Air. It's discouraging how the same battles are being fought today.

Police killing black people, voting rights, black studies programs. What's your reaction to that?

Well, you know, Terry, that's actually why I wanted to write this book. I started working on it

about five years ago. The Black Lives Matter movement had become a real phenomenon, and it was

a new movement led by a young black generation focused around a symbol that was getting a lot of

attention, but that not everybody understood. That both challenged the white power structure,

but also questioned a lot of the agenda of the older black establishment. I was watching all

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