Library:Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism

Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism
Author	Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)
Publisher	Random House
First published	1971 New York
Edition	First Edition
Type	Book
Source	https://archive.org/details/stokelyspeaksbla00carm

Dedication

This book is dedicated to President Ahmed Sékou Touré and Mme. Touré and to my brothers and sisters in Guinea who have suffered much to maintain Africa's dignity and sustain Africa's will to survive.

Editor's Preface

"This is one reason Africa has such importance: the reality of black men ruling their own nations gives blacks elsewhere a sense of possibility, of power, which they do not now have." The preceding quote comes not from one of Stokely Carmichael's recent speeches but from "Power and Racism," the third chapter of this anthology. It was written in 1966, after the famous Meredith Mississippi March which had thrust the personality of Stokely Carmichael and the concept of Black Power into the lives of black people across the United States. I call these few words concerning the importance of Africa and the date to the reader's attention because they illustrate very well the central point which this editor wishes to focus upon: that this new collection of Carmichael's articles and speeches documents his consistent growth and development as a revolutionary activist and theoretician from 1965 until the present, 1971. Beginning with the first chapter, "Who Is Qualified?" through the final chapter, "From Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism," the speeches, in chronological order, clearly demonstrate the ideological development of the author—who has become one of the most loved, hated, respected, feared and misunderstood black men of our generation.

But perhaps more important than summarizing the ideological history of a controversial black leader, this book also serves to some extent as a history of the "Black Movement" during the past six years. For the concepts which Stokely developed during these years grew out of the collective experience of his study, travel and work. The work included: organizing for and working within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later the Black Panther Party; founding and working with many other local and national black organizations seeking to develop independent black political institutions in the ghettos of the United States; and speaking before his brothers and sisters whenever and wherever possible, trying to develop the correct political perspective and consciousness among our people. In acquiring this experience, it is obvious that interactions with other co-workers, long hours of planning strategy and exchange of ideas, along with the hard lessons which America teaches those who dare challenge her methods of operating, have all helped produce Stokely Carmichael. His own growth and development cannot be seen in strict isolation from that of the movement, which in our generation started with civil rights, moved on to Black Power, and is now beginning to recognize and understand Brother Malcolm's call for us to internationalize our struggle and look home toward Mother Africa. Thus, this volume is of double importance to students of history and politics, and to all those brothers and sisters who profess an interest in the black liberation struggle, whether as activists or supporters. Although six years are but a dot on the historical spectrum, persons of African descent must surely admit that the past five or ten years have represented one of the most important and dynamic periods in our long struggle for freedom which began on the slave ships.

But, just as Stokely Carmichael is a product of this recent period of struggle, so has he also become one of the few men who can and does give meaningful, serious direction to our efforts. Having worked with Stokely Carmichael since 1966 and having been a close observer of his development into a national, then international leader, it is a most difficult task for me to jot down my impressions, observations and analysis, knowing that their objectivity will surely be questioned by many. But no one will deny the fact that black people living in the United States rejoiced at the appearance of the Black and Beautiful charismatic Stokely in 1966, which filled the vacuum left by Malcolm's death. How could we ever count the number of brothers and sisters who flooded the SNCC offices with requests for Carmichael to come to their schools, cities, towns, counties and organizations to speak, bring the message to them and help them organize?

Blacks here in America, and elsewhere by then, followed closely his 1967 travels in Africa and the Third World— some with pride, others puzzled, but all anxious to hear what he had learned and how it related to them. Upon his return, Panther leaders beseeched him to speak in behalf of the recently imprisoned Huey P. Newton, asserting that only he had the stature, influence and ability to help them publicize Huey's plight. Stokely's willingness to do this resulted in the party's declaring him Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party and of Colonized Afro-America in February 1968.

Shortly thereafter began a period of deliberate withdrawal from the public eye in which the author accepted only limited speaking engagements and concentrated his efforts on building the Black United Front in Washington, D.C., which he hoped would later serve as a model to be repeated in other cities and towns of America. At the same time. Stokely was quietly making plans for his future residence in Guinea, West Africa, having become convinced of the need for further study and of the need for us to establish concrete ties with the Mother Continent. The groundwork for these plans had been established during his 1967 visits with certain African heads of state and with Osaygefo, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

It was also in early 1968 that the American press began a clever campaign of attacks on Stokely Carmichael—all designed to discredit him on both personal and political levels. That these attacks and insinuations were deliberate fabrication was rarely even investigated or questioned by the "Negro" news media—they just dutifully repeated and reprinted the rumors white folks had dropped for them. Stokely's refusal to dignify the rumors by refuting them was interpreted by so many of our misinformed brothers and sisters as confirmation of the rumors.

Along with the well-organized anti-Stokely campaign in the mass media came attacks from within the black community from Panther leaders and other so-called Marxists, who began labeling him and all others who didn't follow the "party line" as "pork chop nationalists," "cultural nationalists," etc. It is to Mr. Carmichael's credit that he refused to dignify these "charges" and attacks— and further, to engage in personal attacks on the opposition. A little later, a few remaining members of the once dynamic and influential SNCC decided to "expel" Stokely, using certain "charges" as justification for the "expulsion." Once again, Stokely did not attack his adversaries on the petty, personal level, but preferred to debate the political issues—which are what the "expulsion" and all the name calling were really about. By this time it became clear that a whole lot of folks, from the government through the neo-Marxists to Black Power pimps in the ghetto, feared both Brother Carmichael's political ideology, and his personality which so forcefully presented that ideology.

Stokely remained silent, receiving insults from many who had idolized him only a few years before, from many who had received their early lessons in black consciousness from him, from many who had benefited by their association with him, and from those who had used his name and personality to help build their own thing. In January 1969 he left the United States for Africa, amidst further rumors and accusations that he was "running away" and "going into exile." The situation was very similar to that surrounding Brother Malcolm's departure for Africa in 1964, when so many of his close associates and co-workers began to accuse him of "going away when we need him most over here." During those hot summer months of the 1964 Harlem rebellion, while working as secretary in the Organization of Afro-American Unity (O.A.A.U.) office, I remember very well that some of our brothers and sisters even accused Malcolm of "being just another bourgeois nigger" (referring to his visits with African heads of states), while others could see no benefit whatsoever in his going to Africa. "What does that have to do with us when Harlem is on fire over here?" they questioned. Of course, very few would now want to admit their earlier lack of vision and understanding of Malcolm's mission.

Although Brother Stokely has sent a few messages back to our people in North America and although he returned for a few months in 1970, many have either not heard about the work he is doing in Africa or still do not fully understand its implications. Recently a sister asked me if Stokely "had gone over to Africa and found another cause." To this sister, to so many of our people who are confused and to the student of politics and history, I advise that you read this volume carefully, from beginning to end. Each speech demonstrates the logical growth and development which carried Stokely Carmichael from the Mississippi Delta to Conakry, Guinea. But, perhaps what will strike the reader most is the fact that certain revolutionary positions and ideas which Stokely holds today were also held by him several years ago—they have only been altered or strengthened by the passing years.

For instance, the reader will learn that Stokely has clearly always been anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. A close co-worker and friend of several years recalls that he was talking about land reform in the Mississippi Delta as far back as 1963, when most of his associates thought "the nigger must be crazy talking about us taking over Eastland's plantation." In the 1966 article, "Power and Racism," from which the opening quote was taken, he dis- cusses the need to destroy capitalism, develop undying love within the black community and to develop a communal system among blacks.

At Berkeley he discussed the impossibility of economically insecure blacks building coalitions with the economically secure "liberal" whites. He spoke of our hooking up with black people around the world—not only psychologically but in terms of concrete working relationships.

In 1967 at the Latin American Solidarity Conference, he emphasized the fact that our language and cultural links with Africa had been broken in the same way that white Europeans force their language and culture on Latins living in the United States.

At the "Free Huey" rally in Oakland, California, in February 1968, Carmichael began to sharpen the concept that all persons of African descent, regardless of where they were born or lived, are Africans, that we must develop the concept of "undying love" for our people, and the necessity of joining the nine hundred million Africans scattered around the globe. Further, he began stressing the need for acquiring "a piece of land."

Before the national Arab Student Conference in the autumn of 1968. he spoke about our fighting to defend Egypt, which is a part of Africa.

In Greensboro, North Carolina, right before leaving for Africa, he stressed the need for us to move past the "entertainment stage" of shouting about "how bad we are" and begin to engage in hard, serious analytical study if we were serious about revolution.

Thus, throughout these speeches, from 1965 to 1971, there are common threads, some of which are later discarded and others developed and strengthened. This does not imply that the reader will not find contradictions. There are bound to be contradictions in anyone's ideas and philosophy as each new day, week, month and year teaches us something new and clarifies a past misconception. To all who approach this book with an open mind, anxious to learn what the enigmatic Stokely Carmichael is all about, "where he's coming from," and how he arrived at his present mission and ideology, I think this volume offers some clear answers and insights. Even his enemies and those ready to believe the worst about any fellow black man may be in for a surprise and learn something if they are willing to put their own ideas to a test and meet the challenge. And to be honest, most of us do find Carmichael's ideas and plans to be a challenge, which too many of us are afraid to face.

It has indeed been difficult to choose the speeches and articles included here. In Montreal, Canada, in 1968, at the Black Writers Conference, near pandemonium broke out as he spoke, yet we were unable to include this particular speech. Likewise we have not included the many speeches given in Guyana or Africa, where he has always been received as a head of state and given a joyous welcome by Africans from all walks of life. The reader should note that large sections were edited out of several speeches to avoid repetition where the same ideas are discussed adequately in other speeches. For instance, large segments were taken out of the OLAS speech because they duplicated what he had just finished saying at the Dialectics of Liberation Conference in London, which is recorded in the previous chapter. So, too, have large segments been extracted from the Greensboro, North Carolina, speech.

The difference in delivery style before black audiences and before white audiences is striking—thus one will be aware of the warmth and rapport which existed when he spoke before black groups. At the same time, the printed speeches cannot help losing much of their fire and enthusiasm of delivery since it is impossible to transmit audience reaction and all of Stokely's quips onto paper.

In the "Free Huey" speech, the author chose to edit out the lines claiming that "socialism and communism are irrelevant to the struggle of black people." When he said this, Stokely was referring to the sterile, stale brand of European Marxism-Leninism which so many "white radicals" in this country were and still are trying to push among black activists—an ideology which does not deal with the twentieth-century realities of racism and world racial polarization. Further, it completely ignores the fact that socialism has its roots in African communal systems. Because his statement made at the rally was not clarified at the time, he felt it better to delete it from the speech—as was done on his recently released record titled "Free Huey."

I would like to add that the publishers, following the normal editorial procedure, have excluded all the speech openings where Stokely usually introduced co-workers and associates traveling with him at the time. In many cases I am sure that Stokely would want their names mentioned here because of their valuable services to him and the contributions to the struggle which they have made and continue to make. Such persons would include Carver "Chico" Neblett, Cleveland "Cleve" Sellers, Jan Bailey, William "Winky" Hall, and Jean "Koko" Hughes Farrow. I hope that any I have overlooked will forgive me. I must add that in Montreal, Atlanta, and wherever his wife is present, Miriam has always been introduced by the host group as "first lady of the Black World" and so acknowledged by the audience.

This editor wishes to thank the following brothers and sisters for their assistance when urgently needed: Florence Tate, for her advice and assistance with the editing; Freddie Greene Biddle, for supplying detailed data on SNCC's early activities and Carmichael's early years in the movement; Jan Bailey, for making his Carmichael speech collection available to me; and to David Brothers, who has come through always on short notice and helped me deliver copy to meet last-minute deadlines.

We all hope that careful reading of this book will spur our brothers and sisters on to begin the challenging task of serious study, analysis and planning that lie ahead of us. We know it will be read and discussed, because to do otherwise would only perpetuate the ignorance and confusion which presently surrounds Stokely Carmichael the man and his ideas. That he has made mistakes and has his faults only confirms that he is indeed human.

Few other black men in our generation have inspired the love, respect, fear, and hatred which Stokely inspires among our people. And I do not exaggerate. The love and/or respect is clearly shown when three thousand blacks jam Howard University's auditorium, which seats fifteen hundred, to hear him speak. It is shown when our people plead with him to come back to the United States, saying how badly he is needed here. The fear, which frequently inspires hatred, is clearly evident by the amount of time, energy and money which his enemies spend attempting to discredit him. It is up to you, the reader, to find out what it's all about.

— Ethel N. Minor

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Miss Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez for her invaluable help with the essays "Who Is Qualified?" and "Power and Racism."

A very special thank-you to my brother and colleague Michael ("Mike") Thelwell for his help with Towards Black Liberation.

I would like to thank my mother, May Charles, who served as my messenger.

I wish to express my gratitude to Sister Florence Tate for her assistance in reading and editing the manuscript.

And, of course, Ethel Minor, who not only served as editor and personal secretary, but also as political adviser—a true sister dedicated to our revolutionary struggle.

Naturally I must thank my wife, Zenzi, who has served and continues to serve as my everything.

Notes About a Class

By Jane Stembridge

The most important class was "Stokely's speech class." He put eight sentences on the blackboard, with a line between, like this:

I digs wine	I enjoy drinking cocktails
The peoples wants freedom	The people want freedom
Whereinsoever the policemens goes they causes troubles	Anywhere the officers of the law go, they cause trouble
I wants to reddish to vote	I want to register to vote

STOKELY What do you think about these sentences? Such as—The peoples wants freedom?

ZELMA It doesn't sound right.

STOKELY What do you mean?

ZELMA "Peoples" isn't right.

STOKELY Does it mean anything?

MILTON People means everybody. Peoples means everybody in the world.

ALMA Both sentences are right as long as you understand them.

HENRY They're both okay, but in a speech class you have to use correct English.

(Stokely writes "correct English" in corner of blackboard.)

ZELMA I was taught at least to use the sentences on the right side.

STOKELY Does anybody you know use the sentences on the left?

CLASS Yes.

STOKELY Are they wrong?

ZELMA In terms of English, they are wrong.

STOKELY Who decides what is correct English and what is incorrect English?

MILTON People made rules. People in England, I guess.

STOKELY You all say some people speak like on the left side of the board. Could they go anywhere and speak that way? Could they go to Harvard?

CLASS Yes. No.

STOKELY Does Mr. Turnbow speak like on the left side?

CLASS Yes.

STOKELY Could Mr. Turnbow go to Harvard and speak like that? "I wants to reddish to vote."

CLASS Yes.

STOKELY Would he be embarrassed?

CLASS Yes.

ZELMA He wouldn't be, but I would. It doesn't sound right.

STOKELY Suppose someone from Harvard came to Holmes County and said, "l want to register to vote?" Would they be embarrassed?

ZELMA No.

STOKELY Is it embarrassing at Harvard but not in Holmes County? The way you speak?

MILTON It's inherited. It's depending on where you come from. The people at Harvard would understand.

STOKELY Do you think the people at Harvard should forgive you?

MILTON The people at Harvard should help teach us correct English.

ALMA Why should we change if we understand what we mean?

SHIRLEY It is embarrassing.

STOKELY Which way do most people talk?

CLASS Like on the left.

(He asks each student. All but two say "Left." One says that Southerners speak like on the left, Northerners on the right. Another says that Southerners speak like on the left, but the majority of people speak like on the right.)

STOKELY Which way do television and radio people speak ?

CLASS Left. (There was a distinction made by the class between Northern commentators and local programs. Most programs were local and spoke like on the left, they said.)

STOKELY Which way do teachers speak?

CLASS On the left, except in class.

STOKELY If most people speak on the left, why are they trying to change these people?

GLADYS If you don't talk right, society rejects you. It embarrasses other people if you don't talk right.

HANK But Mississippi society, ours, isn't embarrassed by it.

SHIRLEY But the middle class wouldn't class us with them.

HANK They won't accept "reddish." What is reddish? It's Negro dialect and it's something you eat.

STOKELY Will society reject you if you don't speak like on the right side of the board? Gladys said society would reject you.

GLADYS You might as well face it, man! What we gotta do is go out and become middle class. If you can't speak good English, you don't have a car, a job, or anything.

STOKELY If society rejects you because you don't speak good English, should you learn to speak good English?

CLASS No!

ALMA I'm tired of doing what society say. Let society say "reddish" for a while. People ought to just accept each other.

ZELMA I think we should be speaking just like we always have.

ALMA If I change for society, I wouldn't be free anyway.

ERNESTINE I'd like to learn correct English for my own sake.

SHIRLEY I would too.

ALMA If the majority speaks on the left, then a minority must rule society. Why do we have to change to be accepted by the minority group?

(Lunchtime.)

STOKELY Let's think about two questions for next time : What is society? Who makes the rules for society?

The class lasted a little more than an hour. It moved very quickly. It was very good. That is, people learned. I think they learned because:

—people learn from someone they trust, who trusts them. This trust included Stokely's self-trust and trust, or seriousness, about the subject matter;

—people learn more, and more quickly, from induction rather than deduction;

—people learn when they themselves can make the con- nection between ideas; can move from here to here to here to there;

—people learn when learning situations emphasize and develop one single idea, which is very important to them personally;

—people learn when they can see what they are talking about. Stokely used the board.

Among other things, they themselves concluded:

—there is something called "correct English" and some- thing called "incorrect English";

—most people in the country use some form of incorrect or broken English;

—it is not embarrassing to these people themselves;

—it is made embarrassing by other people because it is embarrassing to them;

—they are a minority, the people who use correct English;

—they decide what is correct English;

—they make that important and use it to shame people and keep them out of society;

—they make that a requirement for jobs and acceptance;

—they decide who is acceptable to society, by shame ; but not everybody can be shamed—not Mr. Turnbow, for example;

—the main thing is to understand what people mean when they talk;

—that is not the main thing to society;

I recorded the whole class because it is a whole thing— one thing. That is why people learned. At least, that is why I learned.

I don't want to make conclusions or proposals. I think Stokely's class can stand on its own. Not only that, I think it is better than anything I could say. Just two things : he spoke to where they were at, and they were at different places, and the places changed during the movement of the discussion. Secondly, he trusted them and he trusted himself . . . and they trusted him.

Who Is Qualified?

[Poverty] is no longer associated with immigrant groups with high aspirations; it is identified with those whose social existence makes it more and more diffcult to break out into the larger society. At the same time, the educational requirements of the economy are increasing."

— Michael Harrington, The Other America

Lowndes County, Alabama

I wouldn't be the first to point out the American capacity for self-delusion. One of the main reasons for the criticism of American society by the Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other groups is that our society is exclusive while maintaining that it is inclusive. Although automation has prompted some rethinking about the Alger myth and upward mobility, few people are realistic about the ways in which one legally can "make it" here—or who can make it.

The real ways are three: by having money, by knowing the right people, and by education. The first two methods cannot be acknowledged by most of our citizens or our government because they are not available to everyone and we want to think that everyone has equal opportunity in the United States. Therefore, Americans compensate for this by saying that at least there is education, and that is available to anyone who cares enough.

The panacea for lack of opportunity is education, as is the panacea for prejudice. But just how available is it? If every sixteen-year-old in the nation were motivated to attend high school, he could not: there are not enough schools, not enough physical space. As for college, less than one-quarter of the population ever gets there. The financial barrier is too high; even the cheapest state college charges fees which are impossible for the poor. Scholarships serve only the gifted. To make matters worse, many universities and colleges are already fighting off the mob by making entry more difficult. It is getting harder, not easier, for the poor to be included here. For the Negro, there is an additional problem. He is not psychologically attuned to think of college as a goal. Society has taught him to set short sights for himself, and so he does.

Hard work was once considered a fourth way to climb the ladder, and some Americans still see it as a possibility. Automation should have buried that once and for all: you can't start as an elevator operator and move up to be the president of the company, because there are—or soon will be—buttons instead of operators. Actually, the hard-work method was finished off before automation—but until today only a handful of social critics had the nerve to say that ours was a nation of classes. You have to start ahead of the pack to make that climb.

Think now of the Southern Negro, driven off the land in increasing numbers today, coming to the Northern city. He can hardly be compared to previous immigrants, most of whom brought skills with them. Others took menial work until they could save up and open "a little shop." The Southern Negro arrives; is he to pick cotton in Manhattan? He finds the menial work automated and the "little shop" gobbled up by supermarkets. He is, in fact, unemployable—from the Mississippi Delta to Watts. As for finding work in the new factories of the "changing South," he can forget it; if anything, those factories will be more automated than others. As for education, he probably cannot even read or write because Southern Negro elementary schools are that bad. You have to pass tests to get into college; he doesn't even have the education to get an education. Civil rights protest has not materially benefited the masses of Negroes; it has helped those who were already just a little ahead. The main result of that protest has been an opening up of the society to Negroes who had one of the criteria for upward mobility. Jobs have opened up, but they are mainly the jobs on Madison Avenue or Wall Street—which require education. Housing has opened up, but mainly in the "better neighborhoods." In a sense, the Negroes helped by protest have been those who never wanted to be Negroes. Americans who would point to the occasional Negro in his $30,000 suburban home or his sports car and say, "He made it," should have met the Mississippi lady of color who said to me in 1962: "The food that Ralph Bunche eats doesn't fill my stomach."

The South is not some odd, unique corner of this nation; it is super-America. The Negro is not some "minority group," but a microcosm of the excluded. A white boy may sit with me watching the President on television, and think: I could be President. No such thought would have occurred to this black boy or any other. In fact the white boy is wrong: he doesn't have much chance either of becoming President. Unless he has money, the right contacts or education, he too will be excluded. Racism is real enough in the United States, but exclusion is not based on race alone. There may be proportionately less Negroes than whites among the included; and Negroes are, of course, "last to be hired, first to be fired." But the number of excluded whites is vast. The three criteria for upward mobility apply brutally to black and white everywhere.

Let me make one thing clear: I am not saying that the goal is for Negroes and other excluded persons to be allowed to join the middle-class mainstream of American society as we see it today. Aside from the fact that at least some Negroes don't want that, such inclusion is impossible under present circumstances. For a real end to exclusion in American society, that society would have to be so radically changed that the goal cannot really be defined as inclusion. "They talk about participating in the mainstream," said a Brooklyn College faculty member recently at a teach-in on the anti-poverty program, "when they don't realize that the mainstream is the very cause of their troubles."

Education is one major form (and means) of exclusion; politics is another. Who plays politics in this country? People who have one of the three qualifications for inclusion. They tell us: "Register to vote and take over the political machines." But this is farcical; the only people who take over the machines are other political mechanics.

If there is doubt about the existence of exclusion from politics, the passage of the 1965 Voting Act should have established it. That legislation passed only because most Americans had finally recognized that such exclusion did exist. Readers familiar with the congressional challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party will remember the exclusion—political and even physical—experienced by that group of Southern Negroes. But most Americans do not see that the Voting Act hasn't solved the problem. Recent reports of the Civil Rights Commission and other groups point up the need for more federal examiners and the need to inform Negroes of their rights if the Act is to be meaningful. Yet the attitude of the Justice Department suggests that the government is not yet willing to take the initiative necessary for registering Negroes who are not already free from fear and aware of their rights.

The three criteria mentioned here—money, who you know, and especially education—are what people mean when they use the word qualified. After the Watts uprising, committees were assigned to study the causes and make recommendations. These were composed of the "experts on Negroes," the "qualified." I am not opposed to the presence on such committees of intellectuals and professionals or merely making a parallel objection to poverty boards that don't include the poor. My objection is to the basic approach, which excludes the unqualified.

Again, the Southern Negro is not unique but a microcosm. He has been shamed into distrusting his own capacity to grow and lead and articulate. He has been shamed from birth by his skin, his poverty, his ignorance and even his speech. Whom does he see on television? Who gets projected in politics? The Lindsays and the Rockefellers and even the Martin Luther Kings—but not the Fannie Lou Hamers.* That is why it was so important to project her during the MFDP challenge. Sharecroppers can identify with her. She opens up the hope that they too can be projected, because she says all the things that they have been saying to themselves—but she is heard. Mrs. Hamer's significance is very different from Dr. King's. One hears white people say of Dr. King: "He is so intelligent, so articulate." Of Mrs. Hamer they say: "What a beautiful soul"—implying that she lacks analytical intelligence. To some extent, and sadly, Mrs. Hamer has come to accept this vision of herself. Those who know her, and others like her, feel that her intelligence is just as great and her analysis as sharp. But Dr. King has one of the three qualifications—education. This is no criticism of the man, but of the society.

When SNCC first went to work in Lowndes County, Alabama, I—a "qualified" person by virtue of my college education—used to say to the black people there that they should register to vote and then make their voices heard. They could assert their rights, take over the power structure. This was the prescription of the qualified. But these people said they didn't want to do that; they did not think they could; they did not even want to enter a machine headed by George Wallace. To them politics meant Wallace, Sheriff Jim Clark. and Tom Coleman, who had been accused of the murder of Jonathan Daniels. To them the Democratic Party didn't mean L.B.J., but a crew of racist bullies and killers. Entering politics meant, until last summer, confronting the tools of Wallace: the county registrars who had flunked Negroes consistently for years.

They asked if something different could not be created. They wanted to redefine politics, make up new rules, and play the game with some personal integrity. Out of a negative force, fear, grew the positive drive to think new. SNCC's research department provided the tool: an unusual Alabama law.

Local "freedom parties" are now being organized in ten counties stretching across Alabama's Black Belt, with plans to do this in twelve more counties. Together, they contain 40 per cent of the potential state vote. Given the Flowers-Wallace contest,* which must come, the balance of power could lie with those counties. But the true excitement of this development lies in what it means for the people themselves.

The meetings of the executive committees of these county parties are open. The parties will hold county conventions and draw up platforms in April 1966. Later, candidates will be nominated who must support those platforms. In conventional politics it is the candidates who spell out the platform (i.e., make promises); in Alabama candidates won't have to out-promise each other, but simply represent.

Right now, workshops are being held to prepare for the future: 150 black Alabamans have already learned about the duties of a county sheriff and a tax assessor, with more to come. Very few citizens anywhere in this country know what such duties are.

Some say it is romantic to place faith in "the masses" as a force for radical change. But the people who say this are the "qualified." Alabama Negroes are beginning to believe they don't need to be qualified to get involved in politics. People long accustomed to self-contempt are beginning to believe in their own voice.

Others might say we are leading the black people of Alabama down the road to frustration. Perhaps power politics will eventually overwhelm the freedom parties and the would-be Negro sheriffs. But there are reasons why this might not happen in Alabama. In counties with Negro majorities, there could be a black sheriff elected next year. Even a Governor Wallace will have to deal with him. SNCC learned from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party experience that the Southern Negro doesn't have to cast his lot with the national Democratic Party in order to be recognized as a force which must be dealt with. The Johnson administration pushed through the Voting Act on the assumption that Negroes would automatically line up with its party, but their allegiance is not quite guaranteed. In New York they cast crucial votes for Lindsay, and in the South both Democrats and Republicans are now vying for the Negro vote.

I have hope for this nation, but it is not based on the idea of an American consensus favorable to progress; James Baldwin's idea of the Negro as the conscience of the country is closer to the truth. The majority view is a lie, based on a premise of an upward mobility that doesn't exist for most Americans. They may think the government is at least dealing with basic problems (racial injustice, poverty), but it cannot solve them when it starts from the wrong premise.

The status quo persists because there are no ways up from the bottom. When improvements within the system have been made, they resulted from pressure—pressure from below. Nothing has been given away; governments don't hand out justice because it's a nice thing to do. People must struggle and die first: Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and, in the county where I am working, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo and Jonathan Daniels.

President Johnson's concept of the Great Society is preposterous. The definition comes from him, as does the means of entering that society. Excluded people must acquire the opportunity to redefine what the Great Society is, and then it may have meaning. I place my own hope for the United States in the growth of belief among the unqualified that they are in fact qualified: they can articulate and be responsible and hold power.

Power and Racism

One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to now there has been no national organization that could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghetto. There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites. It served as a sort of buffer zone between them and angry young blacks. None of its so-called leaders could go into a rioting community and be listened to. In a sense, I blame ourselves—together with the mass media—for what has happened in Watts, Harlem, Chicago, Cleveland, and Omaha. Each time the people in those cities saw Martin Luther King get slapped, they became angry; when they saw four little black girls bombed to death, they were angrier; and when nothing happened, they were steaming. We had nothing to offer that they could see, except to go out and be beaten again. We helped to build their frustration.

For too many years, black Americans marched and had their heads broken and got shot. They were saying to the country, "Look, you guys are supposed to be nice guys and we are only going to do what we are supposed to do—why do you beat us up, why don't you give us what we ask, why don't you straighten yourself out?" After years of this, we are at almost the same point—because we demonstrated from a position of weakness. We cannot be expected any longer to march and have our heads broken in order to say to whites: Come on, you're nice guys. For you are not nice guys. We have found you out.

An organization which claims to speak for the needs of a community—as does the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—must speak in the tone of that community, not as somebody else's buffer zone. This is the significance of Black Power as a slogan. For once, black people are going to use the words they want to use—not just the words whites want to hear. And they will do this no matter how often the press tries to stop the use of the slogan by equating it with racism or separatism.

An organization which claims to be working for the needs of a community—as SNCC does—must work to provide that community with a position of strength from which to make its voice heard. This is the significance of Black Power beyond the slogan.

Black Power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America to their questions about it. We should begin with the basic fact that black Americans have two problems: they are poor and they are black. All other problems arise from this two-sided reality: lack of education, the so-called apathy of black men. Any program to end racism must address itself to that double reality.

Almost from its beginning, SNCC sought to address itself to both conditions with a program aimed at winning political power for impoverished Southern blacks. We had to begin with politics because black Americans are a propertyless people in a country where property is valued above all. We had to work for power, because this country does not function by morality, love, and nonviolence, but by power. Thus we determined to win political power, with the idea of moving on from there into activity that would have economic effects. With power, the masses could make or participate in making the decisions which govern their destinies, and thus create basic change in their day-to-day lives.

But if political power seemed to be the key to self-determination, it was also obvious that the key had been thrown down a deep well many years earlier. Disenfranchisement, maintained by racist terror, made it impossible to talk about organizing for political power in 1960. The right to vote had to be won, and SNCC workers devoted their energies to this from 1961 to 1965. They set up voter registration drives in the Deep South. They created pressure for the vote by holding mock elections in Mississippi in 1963 and by helping to establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964. That struggle was eased, though not won, with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. SNCC workers could then address themselves to the question: Who can we vote for, to have our needs met—how do we make our vote meaningful?

SNCC had already gone to Atlantic City for recognition of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party by the Democratic convention and been rejected; it had gone with the MFDP to Washington for recognition by Congress and been rejected. In Arkansas, SNCC helped thirty Negroes to run for school board elections; all but one were defeated, and there was evidence of fraud and intimidation sufficient to cause their defeat. In Atlanta, Julian Bond ran for the state legislature and was elected—twice—and unseated—twice. In several states, black farmers ran in elections for agricultural committees which make crucial decisions concerning land use, loans, etc. Although they won places on a number of committees, they never gained the majorities needed to control them.

All of the efforts were attempts to win Black Power. Then, in Alabama, the opportunity came to see how blacks could be organized on an independent party basis. An unusual Alabama law provides that any group of citizens can nominate candidates for county office, and if they win 20 per cent of the vote, may be recognized as a county political party. The same then applies on a state level. SNCC went to organize in several counties, such as Lowndes, where black people—who form 80 per cent of the population and have an average annual income of $943—felt they could accomplish nothing within the framework of the Alabama Democratic Party because of its racism and because the qualifying fee for the 1966 elections was raised from $50 to $500 in order to prevent most Negroes from becoming candidates. On May 3, 1966, five new county "freedom organizations" convened and nominated candidates for the offices of sheriff, tax assessor, members of the school boards.* Their ballot symbol was the black panther: a bold, beautiful animal, representing the strength and dignity of black demands today. A man needs a black panther on his side when he and his family must endure—as hundreds of Alabamans have endured—loss of job, eviction, starvation, and sometimes death for political activity. He may also need a gun, and SNCC reaffirms the right of black men everywhere to defend themselves when threatened or attacked. As for initiating the use of violence, we hope that such programs as ours will make that unnecessary; but it is not for us to tell black communities whether they can or cannot use any particular form of action to resolve their problems. Responsibility for the use of violence by black men, whether in self-defense or initiated by them, lies with the white community.

This is the specific historical experience from which SNCC's call for Black Power emerged on the Mississippi march in July 1966. But the concept of Black Power is not a recent or isolated phenomenon: it has grown out of the ferment of agitation and activity by different people and organizations in many black communities over the years. Our last year of work in Alabama added a new concrete possibility. In Lowndes County, for example, Black Power will mean that if a Negro is elected sheriff, he can end police brutality. If a black man is elected tax assessor, he can collect and channel funds for the building of better roads and schools serving black people—thus advancing the move from political power into the economic arena. In such areas as Lowndes, where black men have a majority, they will attempt to use it to exercise control. This is what they seek: control. Where Negroes lack a majority, Black Power means proper representation and sharing of control. It means the creation of power bases from which black people can work to change statewide or nationwide patterns of oppression through pressure from strength—instead of weakness. Politically, Black Power means what it has always meant to SNCC: the coming-together of black people to elect representatives and to force those representatives to speak to their needs. It does not mean merely putting black faces into office. A man or woman who is black and from the slums cannot be automatically expected to speak to the needs of black people. Most of the black politicians we see around the country today are not what SNCC means by Black Power. The power must be that of a community, and emanate from there.

SNCC today is working in both North and South on programs of voter registration and independent political organizing. In some places, such as Alabama, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and New Jersey, independent organizing under the black panther symbol is in progress. The creation of a national "black panther party" must come about; it will take time to build, and it is much too early to predict its success. We have no infallible master plan and we make no claim to exclusive knowledge of how to end racism; different groups will work in their own different ways. SNCC cannot spell out the full logistics of self-determination, but it can address itself to the problem by helping black communities define their needs, realize their strength, and go into action along a variety of lines which they must choose for themselves. Without knowing all the answers, it can address itself to the basic problem of poverty, to the fact that in Lowndes County 86 white families own 90 per cent of the land. What are black people in that county going to do for jobs; where are they going to get money? There must be reallocation of land, of money.

Ultimately, the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives. The colonies of the United States—and this includes the black ghettos within its borders, North and South—must be liberated. For a century, this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has been the same—a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses. This pattern must be broken. As its grip loosens here and there around the world, the hopes of black Americans become more realistic. For racism to die, a totally different America must be born.

This is what the white society does not wish to face; this is why that society prefers to talk about integration. But integration speaks not at all to the problem of poverty—only to the problem of blackness. Integration today means the man who "makes it," leaving his black brothers behind in the ghetto. It has no relevance to the Harlem wino or to the cottonpicker making three dollars a day.

Integration, moreover, speaks to the problem of blackness in a despicable way. As a goal, it has been based on complete acceptance of the fact that in order to have a decent house or education, blacks must move into a white neighborhood or send their children to a white school. This reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that "white" is automatically better and "black" is by definition inferior. This is why integration is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy. It allows the nation to focus on a handful of Southern children who get into white schools, at great price, and to ignore the 94 per cent who are left behind in unimproved all-black schools. Such situations will not change until black people have power—to control their own school boards, in this case. Then Negroes become equal in a way that means something, and integration ceases to be a one-way street. Then integration doesn't mean draining skills and energies from the ghetto into white neighborhoods; then it can mean white people moving from Beverly Hills into Watts, white people joining the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Then integration becomes relevant.

In April 1966, before the furor over Black Power, Christopher Jencks wrote in a New Republic article on white Mississippi's manipulation of the anti-poverty program:

The war on poverty has been predicated on the notion that there is such a thing as a community which can be defined geographically and mobilized for a collective effort to help the poor. This theory has no relationship to reality in the Deep South. In every Mississippi county there are two communities. Despite all the pious platitudes of the moderates on both sides, these two communities habitually see their interests in terms of conflict rather than cooperation. Only when the Negro community can muster enough political, economic and professional strength to compete on somewhat equal terms, will Negroes believe in the possibility of true cooperation and whites accept its necessity. En route to integration, the Negro community needs to develop greater independence—a chance to run its own affairs and not cave in whenever "the man" barks . . . Or so it seems to me, and to most of the knowledgeable people with whom I talked in Mississippi. To OEO, this judgment may sound like black nationalism . . .

Mr. Jencks, a white reporter, perceived the reason why America's anti-poverty program has been a sick farce in both North and South. In the South, it is clearly racism which prevents the poor from running their own programs; in the North, it more often seems to be politicking and bureaucracy. But the results are not so different: in the North, non-whites make up 42 per cent of all families in metropolitan "poverty areas" and only 6 per cent of families in areas classified as not poor. SNCC has been working with local residents in Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi to achieve control by the poor of the program and its funds; it has also been working with groups in the North, and the struggle is no less difficult. Behind it all is a federal government which cares far more about winning the war on the Vietnamese than the war on poverty; which has put the poverty program in the hands of self-serving politicians and bureaucrats rather than the poor themselves; which is unwilling to curb the misuse of white power but quick to condemn Black Power.

To most whites, Black Power seems to mean that the Mau Mau are coming to the suburbs at night. The Mau Mau are coming, and whites must stop them. Articles appear about plots to "get Whitey," creating an atmosphere in which "law and order must be maintained." Once again, responsibility is shifted from the oppressor to the oppressed. Other whites chide, "Don't forget—you're only 10 per cent of the population; if you get too smart, we'll wipe you out." If they are liberals, they complain, "What about me—don't you want my help any more?" These are people supposedly concerned about black Americans, but today they think first of themselves, of their feelings of rejection. Or they admonish, "You can't get anywhere without coalitions," when there is in fact no group at present with whom to form a coalition in which blacks will not be absorbed and betrayed. Or they accuse us of "polarizing the races" by our calls for black unity, when the true responsibility for polarization lies with whites who will not accept their responsibility as the majority power for making the democratic process work.

White America will not face the problem of color, the reality of it. The well-intended say: "We're all human, everybody is really decent, we must forget color." But color cannot be "forgotten" until its weight is recognized and dealt with. White America will not acknowledge that the ways in which this country sees itself are contradicted by being black—and always have been. Whereas most of the people who settled this country came here for freedom or for economic opportunity, blacks were brought here to be slaves. When the Lowndes County Freedom Organization chose the black panther as its symbol, it was christened by the press "the Black Panther Party"—but the Alabama Democratic Party, whose symbol is a rooster, has never been called the White Cock Party. No one ever talked about "white power" because power in this country is white. All this adds up to more than merely identifying a group phenomenon by some catchy name or adjective. The furor over that black panther reveals the problems that white America has with color and sex; the furor over Black Power reveals how deep racism runs and the great fear which is attached to it.

Whites will not see that I, for example, as a person oppressed because of my blackness, have common cause with other blacks who are oppressed because of blackness. This is not to say that there are no white people who see things as I do, but that it is black people I must speak to first. It must be the oppressed to whom SNCC addresses itself primarily, not to friends from the oppressing group.

From birth, black people are told a set of lies about themselves. We are told that we are lazy—yet I drive through the Delta area of Mississippi and watch black people picking cotton in the hot sun for fourteen hours. We are told, "If you work hard, you'll succeed"—but if that were true, black people would own this country. We are oppressed because we are black—not because we are ignorant, not because we are lazy, not because we're stupid (and got good rhythm), but because we're black.

I remember that when I was a boy I used to go to see Tarzan movies on Saturday. White Tarzan used to beat up the black natives. I would sit there yelling, "Kill the beasts, kill the savages, kill 'em!" I was saying: Kill me. It was as if a Jewish boy watched Nazis taking Jews off to concentration camps and cheered them on. Today, I want the chief to beat hell out of Tarzan and send him back to Europe. But it takes time to become free of the lies and their shaming effect on black minds. It takes time to reject the most important lie: that black people inherently can't do the same things white people can do, unless white people help them.

The need for psychological equality is the reason why SNCC today believes that blacks must organize in the black community. Only black people can convey the revolutionary idea that black people are able to do things themselves. Only they can help create in the community an aroused and continuing black consciousness that will provide the basis for political strength. In the past, white allies have furthered white supremacy without the whites involved realizing it—or wanting it, I think. Black people must do things for themselves; they must get poverty money they will control and spend themselves, they must conduct tutorial programs themselves so that black children can identify with black people. This is one reason Africa has such importance: the reality of black men ruling their own nations gives blacks elsewhere a sense of possibility, of power, which they do not now have.

This does not mean we don't welcome help, or friends. But we want the right to decide whether anyone is, in fact, our friend. In the past, black Americans have been almost the only people whom everybody and his momma could jump up and call their friends. We have been tokens, symbols, objects—as I was in high school to many young whites, who liked having "a Negro friend." We want to decide who is our friend, and we will not accept someone who comes to us and says: "If you do X, Y, and Z, then I'll help you." We will not be told whom we should choose as allies. We will not be isolated from any group or nation except by our own choice. We cannot have the oppressors telling the oppressed how to rid themselves of the oppressor.

I have said that most liberal whites react to Black Power with the question, "What about me?" rather than saying: "Tell me what you want me to do and I'll see if I can do it." There are answers to the right question. One of the most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities—which is where the racism exists—and work to get rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley. They admonish blacks to be nonviolent; let them preach nonviolence in the white community. They come to teach me Negro history; let them go to the suburbs and open up freedom schools for whites. Let them work to stop America's racist foreign policy; let them press this government to cease supporting the economy of South Africa.

There is a vital job to e one among poor whites. We hope to see, eventually, a coalition between poor blacks and poor whites. That is the only coalition which seems acceptable to us, and we see such a coalition as the major internal instrument of change in American society. SNCC has tried several times to organize poor whites; we are trying again now, with an initial training program in Tennessee. It is purely academic today to talk about bringing poor blacks and whites together, but the job of creating a poor-white power bloc must be attempted. The main responsibility for it falls upon whites. Black and white can work together in the white community where possible; it is not possible, however, to go into a poor Southern town and talk about integration. Poor whites everywhere are becoming more hostile—not less—partly because they see the nation's attention focused on black poverty and nobody coming to them. Too many young middle-class Americans, like some sort of Pepsi generation, have wanted to come alive through the black community; they've wanted to be where the action is—and the action has been in the black community.

Black people do not want to "take over" this country. They don't want to "get Whitey"; they just want to get him off their backs, as the saying goes. It was, for example, the exploitation by Jewish landlords and merchants which first created black resentment toward Jews—not Judaism. The white man is irrelevant to blacks, except as an oppressive force. Blacks want to be in his place, yes, but not in order to terrorize and lynch and starve him. They want to be in his place because that is where a decent life can be had.

But our vision is not merely of a society in which all black men have enough to buy the good things of life. When we urge that black money go into black pockets, we mean the communal pocket. We want to see money go back into the community and used to benefit it. We want to see the cooperative concept applied in business and banking. We want to see black ghetto residents demand that an exploiting landlord or storekeeper sell them, at minimal cost, a building or a shop that they will own and improve cooperatively; they can back their demand with a rent strike, or a boycott, and a community so unified behind them that no one else will move into the building or buy at the store. The society we seek to build among black people, then, is not a capitalist one. It is a society in which the spirit of community and humanistic love prevail. The word "love" is suspect; black expectations of what it might produce have been betrayed too often. But those were expectations of a response from the white community, which failed us. The love we seek to encourage is within the black community, the only American community where men call each other "brother" when they meet. We can build a community of love only where we have the ability and power to do so: among blacks.

As for white America, perhaps it can stop crying out against "black supremacy," "black nationalism," "racism in reverse," and begin facing reality. The reality is that this nation is racist; that racism is not primarily a problem of "human relations" but of an exploitation maintained—either actively or through silence—by the society as a whole. Can whites, particularly liberal whites, condemn themselves? Can they stop blaming us, and blame their own system? Are they capable of the shame which might become a revolutionary emotion?

We have found that they usually cannot condemn themselves, and so we have done it. But the rebuilding of this society, if at all possible, is basically the responsibility of whites—not blacks. We won't fight to save the present society, in Vietnam or anywhere else. We are just going to work, in the way we see fit, and on goals we define, not for civil rights but for all our human rights.

Toward Black Liberation

One of the most pointed illustrations of the need for Black Power, as a positive and redemptive force in a society degenerating into a form of totalitarianism, is to be made by examining the history of distortion that the concept has been given by the national media of publicity. In this "debate," as in everything else that affects our lives, Negroes are dependent on, and at the discretion of, forces and institutions within the white society that have little interest in representing us honestly. Our experience with the national press has been that when they have managed to escape a meretricious special interest in "Git Whitey" sensationalism and race-war mongering, individual reporters and commentators have been conditioned by the enveloping racism of the society to the point where they are incapable of objective observation and reporting of racial incidents, much less the analysis of ideas. But this limitation of vision and perceptions is an inevitable consequence of the dictatorship of definition, interpretation, and consciousness, along with the censorship of history that the society has inflicted upon the Negro—and itself.

Our concern for Black Power addresses itself directly to this problem: the necessity to reclaim our history and our identity from the cultural terrorism and depredation of self-justifying white guilt.

To do this we shall have to struggle for the right to create our own terms to define ourselves and our relationship to the society, and to have these terms recognized. This is the first necessity of a free people, and the first right that any oppressor must suspend. The white fathers of American racism knew this—instinctively it seems—as is indicated by the continuous record of the distortion and omission in their dealings with the red and black men. In the same way that Southern apologists for the "Jim Crow" society have so obscured, muddied and misrepresented the record of the Reconstruction period, until it is almost impossible to tell what really happened, their contemporary counterparts are busy with the recent history of the civil rights movement.

In 1964, for example, the National Democratic Party, led by L. B. Johnson and Hubert H. Humphrey, cynically undermined the efforts of Mississippi's black population to achieve some degree of political representation. Yet, whenever the events of that convention are recalled by the press, one sees only the version fabricated by the press agents of the Democratic Party. A year later the House representatives in an even more vulgar display of political racism made a mockery of the political rights of Mississippi's Negroes when it failed to unseat the Mississippi delegation to the House—which had been elected through a process that methodically and systematically excluded over 450,000 voting-age Negroes, almost one-half of the total electorate of the state. Whenever this event is mentioned in print, it is in terms that leave one with the rather curious impression that somehow the oppressed Negro people of Mississippi are at fault for confronting the Congress with a situation in which they had no alternative but to endorse Mississippi's racist political practices. I am speaking now of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

I mention these two examples because, having been directly involved in them, I can see very clearly the discrepancies between what happened and the versions that are finding their way into general acceptance as a kind of popular mythology. The victimization of the Negro takes place in two phases: first it occurs in fact and deed; then, and this is equally sinister, in the official recording of those facts.

The Black Power program and concept being articulated by SNCC, CORE, and a host of community organizations in the ghettos of the North and South, has not escaped that process. The white press has been busy articulating their own analyses, their own interpretations and criticisms. For example, while the press has given wide and sensational dissemination to attacks made by figures in the civil rights movement—foremost among them are Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League—and to the hysterical ranting about black racism made by that political chameleon, Vice-President Humphrey, it has generally failed to give accounts of the reasonable and productive dialogue that is taking place in the Negro community, and in certain important areas in the white religious and intellectual community. A national committee of influential Negro churchmen affiliated with the National Council of Churches, despite their obvious respectability and responsibility, had to resort to a paid advertisement to articulate their position, while anyone shouting the hysterical yappings of "black racism" got ample space. Thus the American people have got at best a superficial and misleading account of the very terms and tenor of this debate. I wish to quote briefly from the statement by the national committee of churchmen, which I suspect the majority of Americans will not have seen. This statement appeared in the New York Times, July 31, 1966:

We, an informal group of Negro Churchmen in America, are deeply disturbed about the crisis brought upon our country by historic distortions of important human realities in the controversy about "black power." What we see shining through the variety of rhetoric is not anything new but the same old problem of power and race which has faced our beloved country since 1619.

. . . The conscience of black men is corrupted because, having no power to implement the demands of conscience, the concern for justice in the absence of justice becomes a chaotic self-surrender. Powerlessness breeds a race of beggars. We are faced now with a situation where powerless conscience meets conscience-less power, threatening the very foundations of our Nation.

. . . We deplore the overt violence of riots, but we feel it is more important to focus on the real sources of these eruptions. These sources may be abetted inside the Ghetto, but their basic cause lies in the silent and covert violence which white middle-class America inflicts upon the victims of the inner city.

. . . In short, the failure of American leaders to use American power to create equal opportunity in life as well as law, this is the real problem and not the anguished cry for black power.

. . . Without the capacity to participate with power, i.e., to have some organized political and economic strength to really influence people with whom one interacts—integration is not meaningful.

. . . America has asked its Negro citizens to fight for opportunity as individuals, whereas at certain points in our history what we have needed most has been opportunity for the whole group, not just for selected and approved Negroes.

. . . We must not apologize for the existence of this form of group power, for we have been oppressed as a group and not as individuals. We will not find our way out of that oppression until both we and America accept the need for Negro Americans, as well as for Jews, Italians, Poles, and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, among others, to have and to wield group power.

Traditionally, for each new ethnic group, the route to social and political integration in America's pluralistic society has been through the organization of their own institutions with which to represent their communal needs within the larger society. This is simply stating what the advocates of Black Power are saying. The strident outcry, particularly from the liberal community, that has been evoked by this proposal can be understood only by examining the historic relationship between Negro and white power in this country.

Negroes are defined by two forces: their blackness and their powerlessness. There have been, traditionally, two communities in America: the white community, which controlled and defined the forms that all institutions within the society would take, and the Negro community, which has been excluded from participation in the power decisions that shaped the society, and has traditionally been dependent upon and subservient to the white community.

This has not been accidental. The history of every institution of this society indicates that a major concern in the ordering and structuring of the society has been the maintaining of the Negro community in its condition of dependence and oppression. This has not been on the level of individual acts of discrimination—individual whites against individual Negroes—but total acts by the white community against the Negro community. This fact cannot be too strongly emphasized—that racist assumptions of white superiority have been so deeply ingrained in the structure of the society that it infuses its entire functioning, and is so much a part of the national subconscious that it is taken for granted and is frequently not even recognized. It is more than a figure of speech to say that the Negro community in America is the victim of white imperialism and colonial exploitation.

It is white power that makes the laws, and it is violent white power in the form of armed white cops that enforces those laws with guns and nightsticks. The vast majority of Negroes in this country live in captive communities and must endure these conditions of oppression because, and only because, they are black and powerless. Without bothering to go into the historic factors that contribute to this pattern—economic exploitation, political impotence, discrimination in employment and education—one can see that to correct this pattern will require far-reaching changes in the basic power-relationships and the ingrained social patterns within the society. The question, of course, is: What kinds of changes are necessary, and how is it possible to bring them about?

In recent years the answer to these questions that has been given by most articulate groups of Negroes and their white allies, the "liberals" of all stripes, has been in terms of something called "integration." According to the advocates of integration, social justice will be accomplished by "integrating the Negro into the mainstream institutions of the society from which he has been traditionally excluded." It is very significant that each time I have heard this formulation it has been in terms of "the Negro," the individual Negro, rather than in terms of the community.

This concept of integration had to be based on the assumption that there was nothing of value in the Negro community, so the thing to do was to siphon off the "acceptable" Negroes into the surrounding middle-class white community. It is true that the student demonstrations in the South during the early sixties, out of which SNCC came, had a similar orientation. But while it is hardly a concern of a black sharecropper, dishwasher, or welfare recipient whether a certain fifteen-dollar-a-day motel offers accommodations to Negroes, the overt symbols of white superiority and the imposed limitations on the Negro community had to be destroyed. Now black people must look beyond these goals, to the issue of collective power.

Such a limited class orientation was reflected not only in the program and goals of the civil rights movement, but in its tactics and organization. It is very significant that the two oldest and most "respectable" civil rights organizations have constitutions which specifically prohibit partisan political activity. CORE once did, but changed that clause when it changed its orientation toward Black Power. But this is perfectly understandable in terms of the strategy and goals of the older organizations. The civil rights movement saw its role as a kind of liaison between the powerful white community and the dependent Negro one. The dependent status of the black community apparently was unimportant since—if the movement was successful—it was going to blend into the white community anyway. We made no pretense of organizing and developing institutions of community power in the Negro community, but appealed to the conscience of white institutions of power. The posture of the civil rights movement was that of the dependent, the suppliant. The theory was that without attempting to create any organized base of political strength itself, the civil rights movement could influence national legislation and national social patterns by forming coalitions with various "liberal" pressure organizations in the white community—liberal reform clubs, labor unions, church groups, progressive civic groups, and at times one or other of the major political parties.

I think we all have seen the limitations of this approach. We have repeatedly seen that political alliances based on appeals to conscience and decency are chancy things, simply because institutions and political organizations have no consciences outside their own special interests. The political and social rights of Negroes have been and always will be negotiable and expendable the moment they conflict with the interests of our "allies." If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it, and that is precisely the lesson of the Reconstruction. Black people were allowed to register, vote, and participate in politics because it was to the advantage of powerful white allies to promote this. But this was the result of white decision, and it was ended by other white men's decision before any political base powerful enough to challenge that decision could be established in the Southern Negro community. (Thus at this point in the struggle Negroes have no assurance—save a kind of idiot optimism and faith in a society whose history is one of racism—that if it were to become necessary, even the painfully limited gains thrown to the civil rights movement by the Congress will not be revoked as soon as a shift in political sentiments should occur.)

The major limitation of this approach was that it tended to maintain the traditional dependence of Negroes, and of the movement. We depended upon the good will and support of various groups within the white community whose interests were not always compatible with ours. To the extent that we depended on the financial support of other groups, we were vulnerable to their influence and domination.

Also, the program that evolved out of this coalition was really limited and inadequate in the long term, and one which affected only a small select group of Negroes. Its goal was to make the white community accessible to "qualified" Negroes and presumably each year a few more Negroes armed with their passport—a couple of university degrees—would escape into middle-class America and adopt the attitudes and life styles of that group; and one day the Harlems and the Watts would stand empty, a tribute to the success of integration. This is simply neither realistic nor particularly desirable. You can integrate communities, but you assimilate individuals. Even if such a program were possible its result would be, not to develop the black community as a functional and honorable segment of the total society, with its own cultural identity, life patterns, and institutions, but to abolish it—the final solution to the Negro problem. Marx said that the working class is the first class in history that ever wanted to abolish itself. If one listens to some of our "moderate" Negro leaders it appears that the American Negro is the first race that ever wished to abolish itself. The fact is that what must be abolished is not the black community, but the dependent colonial status that has been inflicted upon it. The racial and cultural personality of the black community must be preserved and the community must win its freedom while preserving its cultural integrity. This is the essential difference between integration as it is currently practiced and the concept of Black Power.

What has the movement for integration accomplished to date? The Negro graduating from M.I.T. with a doctorate will have better job opportunities available to him than to Lynda Bird Johnson. But the rate of unemployment in the Negro community is steadily increasing, while that in the white community decreases. More educated Negroes hold executive jobs in major corporations and federal agencies than ever before, but the gap between white income and Negro income has almost doubled in the last twenty years. More suburban housing is available to Negroes, but housing conditions in the ghetto are steadily declining. While the infant mortality rate of New York City is at its lowest rate ever in the city's history, the infant mortality rate of Harlem is steadily climbing. There has been an organized national resistance to the Supreme Court's order to integrate the schools, and the federal government has not acted to enforce that order. Less than 15 per cent of black children in the South attend integrated schools; and Negro schools, which the vast majority of black children still attend, are increasingly decrepit, overcrowded, understaffed, inadequately equipped and funded.

The rate of school dropouts is increasing among Negro teenagers, who then express their bitterness, hopelessness, and alienation by the only means they have—rebellion. As long as people in the ghettos of our large cities feel that they are victims of the misuse of white power without any way to have their needs represented—and these are frequently simple needs (to get the welfare inspectors to stop kicking down your doors in the middle of the night, the cops to stop beating your children, to get the landlord to exterminate the vermin in your home, the city to collect your garbage)—we will continue to have riots. These are not the products of Black Power, but of the absence of any organization capable of giving the community the power, the Black Power, to deal with its problems.

SNCC proposes that it is now time for the black freedom movement to stop pandering to the fears and anxieties of the white middle class in the attempt to earn its "good will," and to return to the ghetto to organize these communities to control themselves. This organization must be attempted in Northern and Southern urban areas as well as in the rural black-belt counties of the South. The chief antagonist to this organization is, in the South, the overtly racist Democratic Party, and in the North the equally corrupt big city machines.

The standard argument presented against independent political organization is, "But you are only 10 per cent." I cannot see the relevance of this observation, since no one is talking about taking over the country, but taking control over our own communities.

The fact is that the Negro population, 10 per cent or not, is very strategically placed because of—ironically—segregation. What is also true is that Negroes have never been able to utilize the full voting potential of our numbers. Where we can vote, the case has always been that the white political machine stacks and gerrymanders the political subdivisions in Negro neighborhoods, so the true voting strength is never reflected in political strength. Would anyone looking at the distribution of political power in Manhattan ever think that Negroes represented 60 per cent of the population there?

Just as often the effective political organization in Negro communities is absorbed by tokenism and patronage—the time-honored practice of "giving" certain offices to selected Negroes. The machine thus creates a "little machine," which is subordinate and responsive to it, in the Negro community. These Negro political "leaders" are really vote deliverers, more responsible to the white machine and the white power structure than to the community they allegedly represent. Thus the white community is able to substitute patronage control for audacious Black Power in the Negro community.

This is precisely what Johnson tried to do even before the Voting Rights Act of 1966 was passed. The national Democrats made it very clear that the measure was intended to register Democrats, not Negroes. The President and top officials of the Democratic Party called in almost one hundred selected Negro "leaders" from the Deep South. Nothing was said about changing the policies of the racist state parties, nothing was said about repudiating such leadership figures as Eastland and Ross Barnett in Mississippi or George Wallace in Alabama. What was said was simply, "Go home and organize your people into the local Democratic Party—then we'll see about poverty money and appointments." (Incidentally, for the most part the war on poverty in the South is controlled by local Democratic ward heelers—outspoken racists who have used the program to change the form of the Negroes' dependence. People who were afraid to register for fear of being thrown off the farm are now afraid to register for fear of losing their children's Head Start places.)

We must organize black community power to end these abuses, and to give the Negro community a chance to have its needs expressed. A leadership that is truly "responsible"—not to the white press and power structure, but to the community—must be developed. Such leadership will recognize that its power lies in the unified and collective strength of that community. This will make it difficult for the white leadership group to conduct its dialogue with individuals in terms of patronage and prestige, and will force them to talk to the community's representatives in terms of real power.

The single aspect of the Black Power program that has encountered most criticism is this concept of independent organization. This is presented as third-partyism which has never worked, or a withdrawal into black nationalism and isolationism. If such a program is developed it will not have the effect of isolating the Negro community but the reverse. When the Negro community is able to control local offices, and negotiate with other groups from a position of organized strength, the possibility of meaningful political alliances on specific issues will be increased. That is a rule of politics and there is no reason why it should not operate here. The only difference is that we will have the power to define the terms of these alliances.

The next question usually is, "So—can it work, can the ghettos in fact be organized?" The answer is that this organization must be successful, because there are no viable alternatives—not the war on poverty, which was at its inception limited to dealing with effects rather than causes, and has become simply another source of machine patronage. And "integration" is meaningful only to a small chosen class within the community.

The revolution in agricultural technology in the South is displacing the rural Negro community into Northern urban areas. Both Washington, D.C., and Newark have Negro majorities. One-third of Philadelphia's population of two million people is black. "Inner city" in most major urban areas is already predominantly Negro, and with the white rush to suburbia, Negroes will in the next three decades control the heart of our great cities. These areas can become either concentration camps with a bitter and volatile population, whose only power is the power to destroy, or organized and powerful communities able to make constructive contributions to the total society. Without the power to control their lives and their communities, without effective political institutions through which to relate to the total society, these communities will exist in a constant state of insurrection. This is a choice that the country will have to make.

Berkeley Speech

It's a privilege and an honor to be in the white intellectual ghetto of the West. This is a student conference, as it should be, held on a campus, and we'll never be caught up in intellectual masturbation on the question of Black Power. That's a function of the people who are advertisers but call themselves reporters. Incidentally, for my friends and members of the press, my self-appointed white critics, I was reading Mr. Bernard Shaw two days ago, and I came across a very important quote that I think is most apropos to you. He says, "All criticism is an autobiography." Dig yourself. OK.

The philosophers Camus and Sartre raise the question of whether or not a man can condemn himself. The black existentialist philosopher who is pragmatic, Frantz Fanon, answered the question. He said that man could not. Camus and Sartre don't answer the question. We in SNCC tend to agree with Fanon—a man cannot condemn himself. If he did, he would then have to inflict punishment upon himself. An example is the Nazis. Any of the Nazi prisoners who, after he was caught and incarcerated, admitted that he committed crimes, that he killed all the many people he killed, had to commit suicide. The only ones able to stay alive were the ones who never admitted that they committed a crime against people—that is, the ones who rationalized that Jews were not human beings and deserved to be killed, or that they were only following orders. There's another, more recent example provided by the officials and the population—the white population—of Neshoba County, Mississippi (that's where Philadelphia is). They could not condemn Sheriff Rainey, his deputies, and the other fourteen men who killed three human beings. They could not because they elected Mr. Rainey to do precisely what he did; and condemning him would be condemning themselves.

In a much larger view, SNCC says that white America cannot condemn herself for her criminal acts against black America. So black people have done it—you stand condemned. The institutions that function in this country are clearly racist; they're built upon racism. The questions to be dealt with then are: How can black people inside this country move? How can white people who say they're not part of those institutions begin to move? And how then do we begin to clear away the obstacles that we have in this society, to make us live like human beings?

Several people have been upset because we've said that integration was irrelevant when initiated by blacks, and that in fact it was an insidious subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy. In the past six years or so, this country has been feeding us a "thalidomide drug of integration," and some Negroes have been walking down a dream street talking about sitting next to white people. That does not begin to solve the problem. We didn't go to Mississippi to sit next to Ross Barnett [former Governor of Mississippi], we did not go to sit next to Jim Clark [sheriff of Selma, Alabama], we went to get them out of our way. People ought to understand that; we were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy. In order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves blacks after they're born. The only thing white people can do is stop denying black people their freedom.

I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people. For example, I am black. I know that. I also know that while I am black I am a human being. Therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people didn't know that. Every time I tried to go into a public place they stopped me. So some boys had to write a bill to tell that white man, "He's a human being; don't stop him." That bill was for the white man, not for me. I knew I could vote all the time and that it wasn't a privilege but my right. Every time I tried I was shot, killed or jailed, beaten or economically deprived. So somebody had to write a bill to tell white people, "When a black man comes to vote, don't bother him." That bill was for white people. I know I can live anyplace I want to live. It is white people across this country who are incapable of allowing me to live where I want. You need a civil rights bill, not me. The failure of the civil rights bill isn't because of Black Power or because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities. That failure is due to the whites' incapacity to deal with their own problems inside their own communities.

And so in a sense we must ask, How is it that black people move? And what do we do? But the question in a much greater sense is, How can white people who are the majority, and who are responsible for making democracy work, make it work? They have failed miserably on this point. They have never made democracy work, be it inside the United States, Vietnam, South Africa, the Philippines, South America, Puerto Rico, or wherever America has been. We not only condemn the country for what it has done internally, but we must condemn it for what it does externally. We see this country trying to rule the world, and someone must stand up and start articulating that this country is not God, and that it cannot rule the world.

The white supremacist attitude, which you have either consciously or subconsciously, is running rampant through society today. For example, missionaries were sent to Africa with the attitude that blacks were automatically inferior. As a matter of fact, the first act the missionaries did when they got to Africa was to make us cover up our bodies, because they said it got them excited. We couldn't go bare-breasted any more because they got excited! When the missionaries came to civilize us because we were uncivilized, to educate us because we were uneducated, and to give us some literate studies because we were illiterate, they charged a price. The missionaries came with the Bible, and we had the land; when they left, they had the land, and we still have the Bible. That's been the rationalization for Western civilization as it moves across the world—stealing, plundering and raping everybody in its path. Their one rationalization is that the rest of the world is uncivilized and they are in fact civilized. But the West is un-civ-i-lized. And that still runs on today, you see, because now we have "modern-day missionaries," and they come into our ghettos—they Head Start, Upward Lift, Bootstrap, and Upward Bound us into white society. They don't want to face the real problem. A man is poor for one reason and one reason only—he does not have money. If you want to get rid of poverty, you give people money. And you ought not to tell me about people who don't work, and that you can't give people money if they don't work, because if that were true, you'd have to start stopping Rockefeller, Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, the whole of Standard Oil, the Gulf Corporation, all of them, including probably a large number of the board of trustees of this university. The question, then, is not whether or not one can work; it's Who has power to make his or her acts legitimate? That is all. In this country that power is invested in the hands of white people, and it makes their acts legitimate.

We are now engaged in a psychological struggle in this country about whether or not black people have the right to use the words they want to use without white people giving their sanction. We maintain the use of the words Black Power—let them address themselves to that. We are not going to wait for white people to sanction Black Power. We're tired of waiting; every time black people try to move in this country, they're forced to defend their position beforehand. It's time that white people do that. They ought to start defending themselves as to why they have oppressed and exploited us. A man was picked as a slave for one reason—the color of his skin. Black was automatically inferior, inhuman, and therefore fit for slavery, so the question of whether or not we are individually suppressed is nonsensical, and it's a downright lie. We are oppressed as a group because we are black, not because we are lazy or apathetic, not because we're stupid or we stink, not because we eat watermelon or have good rhythm. We are oppressed because we are black.

In order to escape that oppression we must wield the group power we have, not the individual power that this country sets as the criterion under which a man may come into it. That's what is called integration. "You do what I tell you to do and we'll let you sit at the table with us." Well, if you believe in integration, you can come live in Watts, send your children to the ghetto schools. Let's talk about that. If you believe in integration, then we're going to start adopting us some white people to live in our neighborhoods. So it is clear that this question is not one of integration or segregation. We cannot afford to be concerned about the 6 per cent of black children in this country whom you allow to enter white schools. We are going to be concerned about the 94 per cent. You ought to be concerned about them too. But are we willing to be concerned about the black people who will never get to Berkeley, never get to Harvard, and cannot get an educa- tion, the ones you'll never get a chance to rub shoulders with and say, "Why, he's almost as good as we are; he's not like the others"? The question is, How can white society begin to move to see black people as human beings ? I am black, therefore I am. Not: I am black and I must go to college to prove myself. I am black, therefore I am. And don't deprive me of anything and say to me that you must go to college before you gain access to X, Y, and Z. That's only å rationalization for suppression.

The political parties of this country do not meet the needs of the people on a day-to-day basis. How can we build new political institutions that will become the polit- ical expressions of people? How can you build political institutions that will begin to meet the needs of Oakland, California? The need of Oakland, California, is not 1,000 policemen with submachine guns. They need that least of all. How can we build institutions that will allow those people to function on a day-to-day basis, so that they can get decent jobs and have decent houses, and they can begin to participate in the policy and make the decisions that affect their lives ? That's what they need, not Gestapo troops, because this is not 1942, and if you play like Nazis, we're not going to play Jew this time around. Get hip to that. Can white people move inside their own community and start tearing down racism where in fact it exists? It is you who live in Cicero and stopped us from living there. White people stopped us from moving into Grenada, Miss. White people make sure that we live in the ghettos of this country. White institutions do that. They must chang6. In order for America to really live on a basic principle of human relationships, a new society must be born. Racism must die. The economic exploitation by this country of non-white people around the world must also die.

There are several programs in the South where whites are trying to organize poor whites so they can begin to move around the question of economic exploitation and political disfranchisement. We've all heard the theory several times. But few people are willing to go into it. The question is, Can the white activist stop trying to be a Pepsi generation who comes alive in the black community, and be a man who's willing to move into the white community and start organizing where the organization is needed ? Can he do that? Can the white activist disassociate him- self from the clowns who waste time parrying with each other and start talking about the problems that are facing people in this state? You must start inside the white community. Our political position is that we don't think the Democratic Party represents the needs of black people. We know that it does not. If, in fact, white people believe that they're going to move inside that structure, how are they going to organize around a concept of whiteness based on true brotherhood and on stopping economic exploitation in order to form a coalition base for black people to hook up with ? You cannot build a coalition based on national sentiment. If you want a coalition to address itself to real changes in this country, white people must start building those institutions inside the white community. And that's the real question facing the white activists today. Can they tear down the institutions that have put us all in the trick bag we've been into for the last hundreds of years? Frederick Douglass said that the youth should fight to be leaders today. God knows we need to be leaders today, because the men who run this country are sick. We must begin to start building those institu- tions and to fight to articulate our position, to fight to be able to control our universities (we need to be able to do that), to fight to control the basic institutions that per- petuate racism by destroying them and building new ones. That's the real question that faces us today, and it is a dilemma because most of us don't know how to work.

Most white activists run into the black community as an excuse. We cannot have white people working in the black community—on psychological grounds. The fact is that all black people question whether or not they are equal to whites, since every time they start to do some- thing, white people are around showing them how to do it. If we are going to eliminate that for the generation that comes after us, then black people must be in positions of power, doing and articulating for themselves. That's not reverse racism; it is moving onto healthy ground; it is becoming what the philosopher Sartre says, an "antiracist racist." And this country can't understand that. What we have in SNCC is antiracist racism. We are against racists. If everybody who's white sees himself as racist and sees us against him, he's speaking from his own guilt.

We do not have the power in our hands to change the institution of war in this country—to begin to re-create it so that they learn to leave the Vietnamese people alone. The only power we have is the power to say, "Hell, no !" to the draft.

The war in Vietnam is illegal and immoral. The ques- tion is, What can we do to stop that war? What can we do to stop the people who, in the name of America, are killing babies, women, and children? We have to say to ourselves that there's a higher law than the law of a fool named Rusk; there's a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It's the law of each of us. We will not murder anybody who they say kill, and if we decide to kill, we're going to decide who it shall be. This country will only stop the war in Vietnam when the young men who are made to fight it begin to say, "Hell, no, we ain't going."

The peace movement has been a failure because it hasn't gotten off the college campuses where everybody has a 2S and is not afraid of being drafted anyway. The problem is how you can move out of that into the white ghettos of this country and articulate a position for those white youth who do not want to go. You cannot do that. It is sometimes ironic that many of the peace groups have begun to call SNCC violent and say they can no longer support us, when we are in fact the most militant or- ganization for peace or civil rights or human rights against the war in Vietnam in this country today. There isn't one organization that has begun to meet our stand on the war in Vietnam. We not only say we are against the war in Vietnam; we are against the draft. No man has the right to take a man for two years and train him to be a killer. Any black man fighting in the war in Vietnam is nothing but a black mercenary. Any time a black man leaves the country where he can't vote to supposedly deliver the vote to somebody else, he's a black mercenary. Any time a black man leaves this country, gets shot in Vietnam on foreign ground, and returns home and you won't give him a burial place in his own homeland, he's a black mercenary. Even if I believed the lies of Johnson, that we're fighting to give democracy to the people in Vietnam, as a black man living in this country I wouldn't fight to give this to anybody. We have to use our bodies and our minds in the only way that we see fit. We must begin, as the philosopher Camus says, to come alive by saying "No." This country is a nation of thieves. It stole every- thing it has, beginning with black people. The U.S. cannot justify its existence as the policeman of the world any longer. The marines are at ready disposal to bring democ- racy, and if the Vietnamese don't want democracy, well then, "We'll just wipe them out, because they don't deserve to live if they won't have our way of life."

There is a more immediate question : What do you do on your campus? Do you raise questions about the hundred black students who were kicked off campus a couple of weeks ago? Eight hundred? And how does that question begin to move? Do you begin to relate to people outside the ivory tower and university walls? Do you think you're capable of building those human relationships as the country now stands? You're fooling yourself. It is impos- Sible for white and black people to talk about building a relationship based on humanity when the country is the way it is, when the institutions are clearly against us.

We have found all the myths of the country to be noth- ing but downright lies. We were told that if we worked hard we would succeed, and if that were true we would own this country lock, stock, and barrel. We have picked the cotton for nothing; we are the maids in the kitchens of liberal white people; we are the janitors, the porters, the elevator men; we sweep up your college floors. We are the hardest workers and the lowest paid. It is non- sensical for people to talk about human relationships until they are willing to build new institutions. Black people are economically insecure. White liberals are economically secure. Can you begin to build an economic coalition? Are the liberals willing to share their salaries with the eco- nomically insecure black people they so much love? Then if you're not, are you willing to start building new insti- tutions that will provide economic security for black people ? That's the question use want to deal with !

American students are perhaps the most politically unsophisticated students in the world. Across every coun-try of the world, while we were growing up, students were leading the major revolutions of their countries. We have not been able to do that. They have been politically aware of their existence. In South America our neighbors have one every 24 hours just to remind us that they are polit- ically aware. But we have been unable to grasp it because we've always moved in the field of morality and love while people have been politically jiving with our lives. You can't move morally against men like Brown and Reagan. You can't move morally against Lyndon Baines Johnson because he is an immoral man. He doesn't know what it's all about. So you've got to move politically. We have to develop a political sophistication that doesn't parrot ("The two-party system is the best system in the world") . We have to raise questions about whether we need new types of political institutions in this country, and we in SNCC maintain that we need them now. Any time Lyndon Baines Johnson can head a party that has in it Bobby Kennedy, Wayne Morse, Eastland, Wallace, and all those other supposed-to-be-liberal cats, there's something wrong with that party. They're moving politically, not morally. If that party refuses to seat black people from Mississippi and goes ahead and seats racists like Eastland and his clique, it's clear to me that they're moving polit- ically, and that one cannot begin to talk morality to people like that.

We must question the values of this society, and I maintain that black people are the best people to do that since we have been excluded from that society. We ought to think whether or not we want to become a part of that society. That's precisely what the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is doing. We are raising ques- tions about this country. I do not want to be a part of the American pie. The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you've been in. I don't want any of your blood money. I don't want to be part of that system. We are the generation who has found this country to be a world power and the wealthiest country in the world. We must question whether or not we want this country to continue being the wealthiest coun- try in the world at the price of raping everybody else. And because black people are saying we do not now want to become a part of you, we are called reverse racists. Ain't that a gas ?

White society has caused the failure of nonviolence. I was always surprised at Quakers who came to Alabama and counseled me to be nonviolent, but didn't have the guts to tell James Clark to be nonviolent. That's where nonviolence needs to be preached—to Jim Clark, not to black people. White people should conduct their nonvio- lent schools in Cicero where they are needed, not among black people in Mississippi. Six-foot-two men kick little black children in Grenada—can you conduct nonviolent schools there? Can you name one black man today who has killed anybody white and is still alive? Even after a rebellion, when some black brothers throw bricks and bottles, ten thousand of them have to pay the price. When the white policeman comes in, anybody who's black is ar- rested because we all look alike.

The youth of this country must begin to raise those questions. We are going to have to change the foreign policy of this country. One of the problems with the peace movement is that it is too caught up in Vietnam, and if America pulled out the troops from Vietnam this week, next week you'd have to get another peace movement for Santo Domingo. We have to hook up with black people around the world; and that hookup must not only be psychological, but real. If South America were to rebel today, and black people were to shoot the hell out of all the white people there, as they should, Standard Oil would crumble tomorrow. If South Africa were to go today, Chase Manhattan Bank would crumble tomorrow. If Zimbabwe, which is called Rhodesia by white people, were to go tomorrow, General Electric would cave in on the East Coast. How do we stop those institutions that are so willing to fight against "Communist aggression" but close their eyes against racist oppression? We're not talking about a policy of aid or sending Peace Corps people in to teach people how to read and write and build houses while we steal their raw materials from them. Because that's all this country does. What underdeveloped countries need is information about how to become industrialized, so they can keep their raw materials where they have them, produce goods, sell them to this country for the price it's supposed to pay. Instead, America keeps selling goods back to them for a profit and keeps sending our modern- day missionaries there, calling them the sons of Kennedy. And if the youth are going to participate in that program, how do you begin to control the Peace Corps ?

This country assumes that if someone is poor, they are poor because of their own individual blight, or because they weren't born on the right side of town, or they had too many children, or went in the army too early, or because their father was a drunk, or they didn't care about school—they made a mistake. That's a lot of non- sense. Poverty is well calculated in this country, and the reason why the poverty program won't work is because the calculators of poverty are administering it.

How can you, as the youth in this country, move to start carrying those things out? Move into the white community. We have developed a movement in the black community. The white activist has miserably failed to develop the movement inside of his community. Will white people have the courage to go into white communi- ties and start organizing them? That's the question for the white activist. We won't get caught up in questions about power. This country knows what power is. It knows what Black Power is because it deprived black people of it for over four hundred years. White people associate Black Power with violence because of their own inabilty to deal with blackness. If we had said "Negro power" nobody would get scared. Everybody would support it. If we said power for colored people, everybody'd be for that, but it is the word "black" that bothers people in this country, and that's their problem, not mine. That's the lie that says anything black is bad.

You're all a college and university crowd. You've taken your basic logic course. You know about major premise, minor premise. People have been telling you anything all black is bad. Let's make that our major premise.

Major premise : Anything all black is bad.

Minor premise or particular premise : I am all black.

Therefore . . . I'm never going to be put in that bag; I'm all black and I'm all good. Anything all black is not necessarily bad. Anything all black is only bad when you use force to keep whites out. Now that's what white people have done in this country, and they're projecting their same fears and guilt on us, and we won't have it. Let them handle their own affairs and their own guilt. Let them find their own psychologists. We refuse to be the therapy for white society any longer. We have gone stark, raving mad trying to do it.

I look at Dr. King on television every single day, and I say to myself: "Now there is a man who's desperately needed in this country. There is a man full of love. There is a man full of mercy. There is a man full of compas- sion." But every time I see Lyndon on television, I say, "Martin, baby, you got a long way to go."

If we were to be real and honest, we would have to admit that most people in this country see things black and white. We live in a country that's geared that way. White people would have to admit that they are afraid to go into a black ghetto at night. They're afraid because they'd be "beat up," "lynched, looted, cut up," etc. It happens to black people inside the ghetto every day, incidentally. Since white people are afraid of that, they get a man to do it for them—a policeman. Figure his mentality. The first time a black man jumps, that white man's going to shoot him. Police brutality is going to exist on that level. The only time I hear people talk about nonviolence is when black people move to defend them- selves against white people. Black people cut themselves every night in the ghetto—nobody talks about nonviolence. Lyndon Baines Johnson is busy bombing the hell out of Vietnam—nobody talks about nonviolence. White people beat up black people every day—nobody talks about non- violence. But as soon as black people start to move, the double standard comes into being. You can't defend your- self. You show me a black man who advocates aggressive violence who would be able to live in this country. Show him to me. Isn't it hypocritical for Lyndon to talk about how you can't accomplish anything by looting and you must accomplish it by the legal ways? What does he know about legality? Ask Ho Chi Minh.

We must wage a psychological battle on the right for black people to define themselves as they see fit, and organize themselves as they see fit. We don't know whether the white community will allow for that organiz- ing, because once they do they must also allow for the organizing inside their own community. It doesn't make a difference, though—we're going to organize our way. The question is how we're going to facilitate those matters, whether it's going to be done with a thousand policemen with submachine guns, or whether it's going to be done in a context where it's allowed by white people warding off those policemen. Are white people who call themselves activists ready to move into the white communities on two counts, on building new political institutions to destroy the old ones that we have, and to move around the concept of white youth refusing to go into the army? If so, than we can start to build a new world. We must urge you to fight now to be the leaders of today, not tomorrow. This country is a nation of thieves. It stands on the brink of becoming a nation of murderers. We must stop it. We must stop it. We must stop it.

We are on the move for our liberation. We're tired of trying to prove things to white people. We are tired of trying to explain to white people that we're not going to hurt them. We are concerned with getting the things we want, the things we have to have to be able to function. The question is, Will white people overcome their racism and allow for that to happen in this country? If not, we have no choice but to say very clearly, "Move on over, or we're going to move on over you."

About the Author

Stokely Carmichael was born in Trinidad and grew up in New York City and Washington, D.C. While at Howard University, from which he graduated in 1964, he was active in local civil rights and the Nonviolent Action Group. He worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1960, and was SNCC chairman in 1966. In 1967 he traveled extensively throughout Africa and Third World countries. He returned to the United States to organize the first Black United Front, in Washington, D.C. In 1968 until 1969, when he resigned for ideological reasons, Mr. Carmichael served as Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party. Since 1970 he has lived with his wife, the African singer Miriam Makeba, in Conakry, Guinea.