North Alabama Historical Review Volume 5 North Alabama Historical Review, Volume 5, 2015 Article 5 2015 The Blackstone Rangers and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement in Chicago Sam Keiser University of North Alabama Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.una.edu/nahr Part of the Public History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Keiser, S. (2015). The Blackstone Rangers and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement in Chicago. North Alabama Historical Review, 5 (1). Retrieved from https://ir.una.edu/nahr/vol5/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UNA Scholarly Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in North Alabama Historical Review by an authorized editor of UNA Scholarly Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Articles 59 The Blackstone Rangers and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement in Chicago Sam Keiser When you think of the Civil Rights Movement in the states north of the Mason-Dixon Line, the last people thought of would be gang members. In our minds, Martin Luther King, James Bevel, Jesse Jackson, and Stokely Carmichael are the people credited with spreading the Movement to the North. Because of this view, the roles local organizations and gangs played in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements is often glossed over. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Chicago in the late ‗60s during the Chicago Freedom Movement of 1966 and the subsequent rise of the Black Power Movement of 1968. This marked a period when gang involvement in the Civil Rights Movement would not only grow; it would actively be sought after.