A friend of mine asked today whether any of us knew when the slogan Power to the People!<\/i> started being used. It seemed like an easy thing to look up. It wasn\u2019t.\r\n
To start with, the actual phrase of four words is one that turns up now and then going back a very long way. But we don\u2019t actually care about the first time anyone put those four words in order\u2014we want to know when it started being used as an anti-establishment slogan. So knowing that someone in the nineteenth century discussed the possibility of entrusting power to the people of a nation is nice and all, but not really to the purpose. Still less is it helpful to find the conquerors endeavouring to render every service in their power to the people whom they had subdued<\/i>. In the general time period we\u2019re looking at (the 1960s) there also references to, for instance, bringing electric power to the people of a particular region by means of a proposed dam or plant. There were also, perhaps more significantly, references to transferring power to the people of a former colony from the former colonial power\u2014the actual four words in question appear in a 1967 UN resolution on the question of Southern Rhodesia and the people of Zimbabwe.\r\n
But we are still a long way from what we\u2019re looking for. When did Power to the People!<\/i> start to be used as a slogan? When was it chalked up on walls and chanted at rallies?\r\n
Alas, I don\u2019t have an answer. The databases I have access to have some substantial gaps, particularly in mid-20th-century newspapers and magazines. Harrumph.\r\n
Here\u2019s what I have: according to an April 1969 article in the Hartford Courant<\/cite>, a meeting of the Black Panthers was concluded by Jose Gonsalves (CT State Black Panther Captain) saying \u201cAll Power to the People. Black Power to Black People. Panther Power to the vanguard.\u201d By a few months later, there is a banner with \u201cAll Power to the People\u201d on it at Black Panther events. This is nearly<\/i> the slogan we looking for\u2014this is the version I associate with the Black Panthers, while the Power to the People!<\/i> slogan is something I associate with the larger counter-culture. But in the Spring of 1969, it is not immediately recognizable to the Courant\u2019s writer.\r\n