This movement, a demonstration of racial pride, called for social, political, and economic changes to generate the black power within white communities. It also demanded for incorporation of black history in school curriculum, embracement of black culture in the society, and dissemination of newly arisen artistic expressions to display the identity of blackness. 

The term can be traced back to author Richard Wright's nonfiction work Black Power, published in the 1954. In 1965, Lowndes County [Alabama] Freedom Organization used the slogan "Black power for black people."

The movement reached to its peak in 1966 accompanied with the emergences of the institutions against police brutality and violence. One of the prominent organizations was the Black Panther Party for Self-defense (BPP). 

Dressed as an Egyptian pharaoh with pan-American hats and togas, Sun Ra, who named himself as “Le Sony’ r Ra” after the Egyptian sun god, is an avant-garde Jazz musician, a professor taught “Sun Ra 171” in Afro-American studies at University of California, Berkeley, and the most influential figure in the history of Afrofuturism. Aspired to break black conciousness from victimhood, Sun Ra created the metaphorical expression, “black knowledge society,” a utopian society built by the blacks in outer space with their knowledge of Science and technology, to free the black conciousness towards psychological liberation and empowerment.  

 

During his years as a performing artist and musician, Sun Ra considered the surrounding world made of “patterns of energy” that can only be “coordinated through music and engagement with the technologies that produced it”. In his experimentations with technologies of musical production, he envisioned to integrate new flows of energy into the band to bring them “in tune with nature and nature’s vibration.”

Heavily influenced by Sun Ra, George Clinton constructed a space age setting in which black characters were the primary protagonists in his musical narratives. During their performances in the 1970s, an enormous UFO “visited” them, emerged from the ceiling as a visual complement to their idea of “Mothership Connection.”  

The album cover of “Mothership Connection” of George Clinton himself emerging from a flying saucer was one of the first times in mainstream culture that an African American had been featured in space.