Soul Power is a cultural history of those whom Cynthia A. Young calls 'U.S. Third World Leftists,' activists of colour who appropriated theories and strategies from Third World anti-colonial struggles in their fight for social and economic justice in the United States during the 'long 1960s.' Nearly thirty countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America declared formal independence in the 1960s alone. Arguing that the significance of this wave of decolonization to U.S. activists has been vastly underestimated, Young describes how literature, films, ideologies, and political movements understood to have originated in the Third World were absorbed by U.S. activists of color.