Black and Red Power United at the Wounded Knee Occupation
February 27, 2025
By Kyle T. Mays
Editor’s Note: On this day in 1973, the Wounded Knee Occupation began. 200 Oglala Lakota and followers of the American Indian Movement occupied the town of Wounded Knee to demand the removal of tribal chairman Richard Wilson from office on charges of corruption and abuse of opponents. They also protested the United States government’s failure to fulfill treaties with Native peoples. It lasted for seventy-one days. The protesters had support, too. As Kyle T. Mays wrote in the following passage from An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, it was an occasion for the Black Power movement to show up for the Red Power movement in solidarity.
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The discourse of Black Power and Red Power existed side by side. The phrase “Black Power” emerged as a rallying cry in Greenwood, Mississippi, in June 1966, in a speech by Stokely Carmichael during the March Against Fear, which was organized after the shooting of James Meredith. While there were earlier iterations of “Black Power,” Carmichael popularized it. In Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, Carmichael and Charles Hamilton wrote, “The adoption of the concept of Black Power is one of the most legitimate and healthy developments in American politics and race relations in our time. . . . It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject the racist institutions and values of this society.” Though Carmichael would later think beyond nation-state borders, he did understand that one had to have a clear sense of self before demanding rights and protections from a state that was predicated on your exploitation.
Native people also participated in the rhetorical power games, raising a fist and utilizing the phrase “Red Power.” Though the etymology of the phrase is not entirely clear, it was most definitely an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty, a declaration that Native people were there to stress to the white settlers that they were reclaiming their right to sovereignty—guaranteed by their treaties. Indigenous intellectuals like Vine Deloria Jr. agreed.
Deloria Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux intellectual, was long a prominent voice for Indigenous rights, including in his role as the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1964 to 1967. In perhaps his most provocative book, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), Deloria shared his belief that the rhetorical assertion of Black Power was an important step toward Black nationalism. For him, white Americans did their best to segregate Black people from entering their neighborhoods, their schools, and their political system. They wanted Black labor but not their full participation in society. In contrast, white people attempted to assimilate Native people in order to take their land. Deloria beckoned Black people to understand that mainstream society had no desire to include them. After reading Deloria, I was like damn, was he trying to do his best Malcolm impersonation? Regardless, Deloria’s assertion generally remains true. Instead of keeping Black people out, corporations with hardly any people of color will ask an activist or scholar of color to teach them how to be antiracist. They might pay you, but they don’t want the truth. Anti-racism is not something that can be taught once; it requires a sustained relationship and a dedication to systematically ending racism.
For Deloria, the discourse of civil rights was a road to nowhere, and designed to make white liberals feel good. He realized that the state did not want Black self-determination, writing:
Civil rights as a movement for legal equality ended when the blacks dug beneath the equality of fictions which white liberals had used to justify their great crusade. Black power, as a communications phenomenon, was a godsend to other groups. It clarified the intellectual concepts which had kept Indians and Mexicans confused and allowed the concept of self-determination suddenly to become valid.
Deloria understood the power of Black rhetoric for others. He believed that Stokely Carmichael’s declaration of Black Power made more sense to Indigenous peoples because it was based upon the language of power and sovereignty. Deloria advocated for Black folks to find a home. “To survive, blacks must have a homeland where they can withdraw, drop the façade of integration, and be themselves,” he wrote. Finally, Deloria left open the possibility of Black and Indigenous solidarity and, perhaps, even a shared space: “Hopefully black militancy will return to nationalist philosophies which relate to the ongoing conception of the tribe as a nation extending in time and occupying space. If such is possible within the black community, it may be possible to bring the problems of minority groups into a more realistic focus and possible solution in the years ahead.” I understand Deloria to being open to forming a new society, where Black and Indigenous peoples share a common space, where we all live and work together—imagining the aftermath of ongoing dispossession.
Black and Indigenous people also participated in each other’s struggles for liberation. They showed up to each other’s protests, including the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972 and the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. In 1972, while in Washington, DC, Pan-Africanist Stokely Carmichael showed up during the third day of the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in which Native activists stormed the office, took it over, and retrieved thousands of documents related to tribal issues. Carmichael, speaking as head of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP), offered to “support this movement 100 percent. The question of native Americans is not just a question of civil rights,” he said. “This land is their land . . . we have agreed to do whatever we can to provide help . . . there can be no settlement until their land is returned to them.” Carmichael understood what it meant to be in solidarity with Indigenous peoples on their land. Vernon Bellecourt, a founding member of the American Indian Movement who became one of its key spokesmen, fondly remembered Carmichael’s sustained support of Native causes in the US. At a memorial service in 1998 celebrating the life of Carmichael at City College, Bellecourt remarked, “Brother Kwame Ture was the first to come in and show his solidarity with the indigenous struggles of the Americas. One year later, at Wounded Knee, the AAPRP and Kwame Ture were there standing with us.” Another example of solidarity was that of Angela Davis. Davis, a radical Black intellectual who had at the time been recently forced to go on the run, attempted to show up and support the resistance at Wounded Knee, though the FBI denied her from joining the occupation.
On February 24, 1974, in Detroit, Michigan, Davis participated in a rally to end political repression. Sponsored by the Michigan Alliance Against Repression and attended by more than one thousand people, Davis gave a speech covering a variety of topics, including the recent election of Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman A. Young. Regarding this historic event, she remarked, “The fires of revolutionary struggle are raging in Detroit.” Also there was Clyde Bellecourt, a member of the American Indian Movement, demonstrating the forging of a Black and Indigenous radicalism that had been vibrant since the 1960s. There to raise funds for those under political repression who occupied Wounded Knee, Bellecourt shared with the Detroit audience that he hoped the US would live up to its treaty obligations toward tribal nations. He also commented on the limitations of being an Indigenous person born in a settler colony, remarking that they become “political prisoners of the United States at birth.”
They also showed some historical and ideological connections in public discourse. While this discourse is not always cordial, it demonstrates to me that Black and Indigenous people were aware of each other’s struggles, and did their best to understand how this relationship might look going forward. Though some in the Black media did not believe that Wounded Knee was a Black issue, others disagreed. Writing for the Black newspaper the Los Angeles Sentinel, Emily Gibson asserted, “Black-controlled media has a special role to play informing us and laying the foundation for a unity which is broader than race.” Nevertheless, people like Bellecourt and Davis understood that to achieve radical change, they needed to support one another. Although their political goals might be different, they both wanted a complete uprooting of the capitalist colonial order.
Others believed that issues like those raised at Wounded Knee offered Afro-Indigenous peoples the opportunity to rightfully claim their heritage. In the Chicago Defender, Reverend Curtis E. Burrell Jr., a longtime Chicago activist and reverend who identified as a Choctaw Freeman from Mississippi, wrote that it was time for Black Indians to reclaim their history. He called upon Black people to “look at their Indian heritage which goes beyond civil rights consciousness.” He desired that Black folks “deal with a consciousness of sovereignty.” In the context of the struggle at Wounded Knee, he believed that “we must . . . not confuse civil rights with sovereign rights.” He challenged civil rights activists, such as Ralph Abernathy, who went to Wounded Knee, to think critically about what possibilities civil rights offered:
The black protest represented by Martin Luther King was a call for equal treatment under the Constitution for all citizens. But the Indian heritage says—we have never nullified our sovereign rights as a nation and we see the white man setting up a sovereignty within our sovereign boundaries. He, therefore, does not seek equal rights under the Constitution—he rejects the Constitution as having authority over him, for he has his own laws and customs and values, and is non-conformist to the white man’s ways. He charges the government which represents this Constitution with violating 371 treaties of agreement.
Therefore, civil rights and sovereign rights have a vast difference between them. The civil rights leaders who rushed off to Wounded Knee, ought to think before they speak. They must ask themselves if they are prepared to relate to their total history as black Indians. They must therefore, ask themselves if they are ready to deal with this.
It is difficult to know how much this opinion affected the Black readers of the Chicago Defender. But as one of the premier Black newspapers, it hopefully had some impact on readers and prompted them to think carefully about the meaning and possibilities of Indigenous sovereignty, and also reclaim and assert Afro-Indigenous heritage. While some in the Black media were engaged in the work of solidarity, groups like the Republic of New Afrika were making their own claims to freedom.
About the Author
Kyle T. Mays (he/him) is an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History, at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2021). Connect with him online at kyle-mays.com, on Twitter (@mays_kyle), and Instagram (@mayskyle).