You Don’t Need a Slogan

From Curtis J. Austin’s highly-recommended (by me) Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party on the introduction of the phrase “black power”:

He [Martin Luther King, Jr.] told [Stokely] Carmichael, who became a national leader of the new movement, after the latter complained about being lambasted in the press over the phrase’s implications, that the difference in the mainstream treatment of him and the young firebrand was “simple.” Referring to the expression black power, King gently explained to Carmichael that, “Maybe I just don’t talk about it.” One-time King lieutenant Andrew Young explained that the reverend believed that “if you go around claiming power, the whole society turns on you and crushes you.” According to Young, King believed that had been the reason why Jews and Catholics, both powerful entities in American society, “denied” they had any real power. Young concluded of King that “it was not black power that he was against, it was the slogan Black Power, because he said, ‘If you really have power you don’t need a slogan.’