Black Muslims, African-American religious movement in the United States, split since 1976 into the American Muslim Mission and the Nation of Islam. The original group was founded (1930) in Detroit by Wali Farad , whom his followers believed to be “Allah in person.” When Farad disappeared mysteriously in 1934, Elijah Muhammad assumed leadership of the group, first in Detroit and then in Chicago. Under his leadership, the black nationalist and separatist sect (then called the Nation of Islam) expanded, mainly among poor blacks and prison populations. Although the group numbered only about 8,000 when Muhammad took over, it grew rapidly in the 1950s and 60s, particularly as a result of the preaching of one of its ministers, Malcolm X. Tension between Muhammad and Malcolm developed, however, and Malcolm's subsequent suspension (1963) and assassination (1965), possibly by Muhammad's followers, caused great dissension in the movement. When Muhammad died in 1975, his son, Wallace D. Muhammad (later Warith Deen Mohammed) took over, preaching a far less inflammatory version of Islam. He aligned the organization with the international Islamic community, moving toward Sunni Islamic practice, and opened the group (renamed the World Community of Islam in the West and later the American Society of Muslims) to individuals of all races. In 1977 a group of Black Muslims, led by Louis Farrakhan, split off from the organization, disillusioned by the son's integrationist ideals and lack of allegiance to his father's brand of Islam. They named themselves the Nation of Islam and sought to follow in the footsteps of Elijah Muhammad. In the late 1990s the Nation of Islam began to embrace some traditional Islamic practices, and Farrakhan and Muhammad publicly declared an end to the rivalry between their groups in 2000. W. Deen Mohammed resigned as head of the American Society of Muslims in 2003.

The movement for Black Power in the U.S. came during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Many members of SNCC, among them Stokely Carmichael, were becoming critical of the nonviolent approach to racism and inequality articulated and practiced by King, the NAACP and other moderates, and rejected desegregation as a primary objective.

SNCC's membership was generally younger than that of the other Big Five civil rights organizations, and became increasingly more militant and outspoken over time. SNCC also saw racists had no qualms about the use of violence against blacks in the U.S. who would not "stay in their place," and that "accommodationist" civil rights strategies had failed to secure sufficient concessions for blacks. As a result, as the Civil Rights Movement progressed, increasingly radical, more militant voices came to the fore to aggressively challenge white hegemony. Increasing numbers of black youth, particularly, had come to reject the moderate path of cooperation, integration and assimilation of their elders. They rejected the notion of appealing to the public's conscience and religious creeds and took the tack articulated by another black activist more than a century before. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote:

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. ...Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.

"Black Power!" as a slogan appears to have originated with Carmichael during the 1966 March Against Fear in Mississippi: "This is the the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain't going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin' us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin' now is Black Power!" Over the remainder of the march, there was a division between those aligned with Martin Luther King, Jr. and those aligned with Carmichael, marked by their respective slogans, "Freedom Now" and "Black Power".

While King never endorsed the slogan, his rhetoric sometimes came close to it. In his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here?, King wrote that "power is not the white man's birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages."

The Black Panther Party (originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was an African American organization that considered itself to be working towards civil rights and self-defense. It was active within the United States in the late 1960s into the 1970s.

Founded in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in October 1966, the organization initially espoused a doctrine calling for armed resistance to societal oppression in the interest of African American justice, though its objectives and philosophy changed radically throughout the party's existence. While the organization's leaders passionately espoused socialist doctrine, the party's black nationalist reputation attracted an ideologically diverse membership base.

The group was founded on the principles of its Ten-Point Program, a document that called for "Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace," as well as exemption from military service that would utilize African Americans to "fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America."

While firmly grounded in black nationalism and begun as an organization that accepted African American membership exclusively, the party reconsidered itself as it grew to national prominence and became an iconic representative of the counterculture revolutions of the 1960s. The Black Panthers ultimately condemned black nationalism as "black racism", and became more focused on socialism without exclusivity, instituting a variety of community programs to alleviate poverty and illness among the communities it deemed most needful of aid, or most neglected by the American government. While the Party retained its all-black membership, it recognized that different communities (those it deemed oppressed by the American government) needed to organize around their own set of issues and encouraged alliances with these organizations