Stokely Charmichael speaking at UCLA 5/24/1967

Speaker 1: I'm a chairman and current field secretary of SNCC, Mr. Stokely Carmichael. Much associated with the term black power, Mr. Carmichael defines it, black people coming together to form a political force and either electing representatives or forcing their representatives to speak their needs. Joining Mr. Carmichael today is H. Rep. Brown, the new chairman of SNCC. Mr. Carmichael has recently returned from the East Coast, where he participated in the anti-war demonstrations in New York. Following his talk, Mr. Carmichael will address himself to the questions that you have submitted in the boxes on the way into the pavilion. And now it is my pleasure to present Stokely Carmichael.

Stokely Carmichael: Good afternoon. I was hoping to see Mr. Al Cinder dunk one of his shots, but the white folk got together and stopped him from doing it. That's just a cutback in black power. We got a setback. Wanted to read an article today which I wrote for the Massachusetts Quarterly entitled, Towards Black Liberation. The article deals theoretically with black power as a concept and then it outlines programmatically the implementation of that concept. It deals with the question of integration as it's practiced in this country and comes to the conclusion that integration is to subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy and dismisses integration as any real way for black people to have equality in this country. It further goes on to attack the coalition theorist and the people who are the major exponents of it, notably Mr. Biden, Rustin, and his concept of coalitions. We want to state here that while we're not opposed to coalitions, we're opposed to coalitions at this time because we do not think that they will benefit black people anything. The paper then moves on to point out the difference between individual acts of racism and institutionalized racism. and the importance to black people of functioning, of turning their attention towards institutionalized racism. Now I know that the press will be incapable of dealing with the article because it's on an intellectual level. as they were incapable of dealing with the conference for the survival of black people yesterday, and as they will be incapable of dealing with all other intellectual matters. But however, since you are a university crowd, we hope you will be able to deal with the paper on its intellectual level. 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 received in the national media of publicity. In this debate, as in everything else that affects our lives, black people are dependent on and at the discretion of forces and institutions within the white society which have little interest in representing us honestly. Our experience with the national press has been that where they've managed to escape a meretricious special interest in get-whitey sensationalism and race war mongering, individual reporters and commentators have been conditioned by the evolving racism of the society to the point where they are incapable even of objective observation and reporting of racial incidents, much less the analysis of ideas. But this limitation of vision and perception is an inevitable consequence of the dictatorship of definition, interpretation, and consciousness along with the censorship of history that the society has inflicted upon black people and consequently upon itself. Our concern for black power addresses itself directly to this problem. the necessity for black people 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 through which 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 dictated by the continuous record of distortion and omission in their dealings with the red and black men. Now, at SNCC, we feel that the importance of definition is uppermost in psychological warfare. As a matter of fact, Mr. Camus on the very first page of The Rebel points out that when a slave stops accepting the definitions imposed upon him by his master, then and only then does he begin to move towards his liberation. And that has been some of the problems that black people and other minorities have suffered in this country. We have been defined by white Western society. Note I define it white western society, never white western civilization. That's a misnomer at best, a lie when you get right down to it. And the importance of definition works very hard against us. Let me give you an example. You ever watch television? you see the red man and the white man are having a fight and the red man is winning so the white man sends for the cavalry and the cavalry come out and they're riding very white and very proper and they get off their horses and they blow their horns and they get their guns they load them up and they shoot and they ride back to the fort and there's a white woman standing outside she says what happened and a dashing lieutenant says we had a victory we killed all the Indians Now, when the reverse happens, when the red man wins the battle and beats up the white man, there's one left hanging on a horse, and he rides to the fort. She says, oh, what happened? Those dirty Indians, they massacred us. The importance of that is very important because a victory is not as honorable as is a massacre. And these poor red people will never win a victory because they'll always win a massacre. And the connotation of a massacre is something foul. I guess the difference is that in a victory you're shot to death in a massacre you're cut to death and if we would die we want to be shot to death rather than cut to death another example of that would be today on television you ever see the editorial twins of America Huntley and Brinkley they're always sitting in judgment of SNCC if we ever judge them they'd flunk but anyway they come on TV and they're talking about Vietnam they say today filthy dirty communist rebel filthy rebel forces threw Molotov cocktails and wounded 17 civilians. And there's a flash, you know, the next cat comes on. In the meantime, our good GIs have been bombing the hell out of North Vietnam. Hold on. So that it is clearly a question of definitions, and it's crystal clear in our minds at SNCC that in this day and age, black people are going to define themselves as they see fit, use the terms that they want to use, and have their oppressors, white America, recognize those terms. We will not be defined or prescribed. In the same way that the 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, the American press, is busy doing the same thing with the recent history of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1964, for example, the National Democratic Party, led by Lyndon Buffoon Johnson, Now, we've called Lyndon a buffoon, and people got upset about it. See, they got upset because they didn't know what a buffoon is. A buffoon is a court jester, and his job is that when things are going bad in the kingdom, to tell everybody it's going okay, to lie to them, in essence. Have you ever seen him on TV when he talks about peace? Every night before I go to bed, I ask myself what have I done to preserve peace. Bombs away. Well anyway, in 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson and H.H. Humphrey, there's another one for you, in the black community we call him handkerchief head Humphrey. Now a handkerchief head is someone who is more obsequious and more unctuous than an Uncle Tom. He is an unconditional yes-man. Did you dig back in January or February when Lyndon Johnson was preparing his State of the Johnson message to the Union? It had to be that. Well, if you notice, the cameras were focused on Lyndon, and handkerchief head was right in the background. And everything Lyndon said... He has developed frog-like features. Every time Johnson says, jump, he says, how high, boss man? Well, anyway, in 1964, these two cats, LBJ and HHH, cynically undermined the efforts of Mississippi's black population to achieve some degree of political representation. I'm speaking now of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenge that took place in Atlantic City, September 1964, at the National Democratic Party Convention. Yet, Whenever the events of that convention are recalled by the press, one sees only that version fabricated by the press agents of the Democratic Party. A year later, we're speaking now about the challenge that the same party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, took to the Congress and asked that the same law invoked against Mr. Powell be invoked against a racist Mississippi congressman. A year later, the House of Representatives, in an even more vulgar display of political racism, made a mockery of the political rights of Mississippi's blacks when it failed to unseat the Mississippi delegation to the House, which had been elected through a process which had systematically excluded over 450,000 voting age blacks, almost one half of the total electorate of that state. A year later, the same House is able to do the same thing to Representative and my Congressman in exile, Adam Clayton Powell, because he does the same thing that they do, but with more style. Whenever this event is mentioned in print, It is in terms which leaves one with the rather curious impression that somehow the oppressed black people of Mississippi are at fault for confronting the Congress with the situation in which they had no alternative but to endorse Mississippi's racist political practices. I mention these two examples because having been directly involved in them, I can see very clearly the discrepancies between what happened and the virgins that are finding their way into general acceptance as a kind of popular mythology. Thus, the victimization of black people takes place in two phases in this country. First, it occurs in fact and deed, and then, and this is equally sinister, It occurs in the recording of those facts and deeds. The black power program and concept which is being articulated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, 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 of their own creations. For example, while the press had given wide and sensational disarmations to attacks made by figures in the civil rights movement foremost among which are Mr. Roy Wilkins of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People and his counterpart Mr. Whitney Young of the Urban League and to the hysterical rantings about black racism made by the political chameleon that now serves as a vice president It has generally failed to give accounts of the reasonable and productive dialogue which has taken place in the black community and in certain important white religious and intellectual communities. A national committee of influential black 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 gotten at best a superficial and misleading account of the very terms and tenor of this debate. Now, I'm going to read a quote to you from an advertisement which was taken out in the New York Times July 3-1 of last year. It was signed by about 150 black churchmen from across the country. I want to read it at length because I don't think people get a chance to hear the very important dialogue that goes on within the black community. They just hear what white people decide who the extremists are and they let them hear who the extremists are. I quote, we an informal group of Negro churchmen in America are deeply disturbed about the crisis brought upon our country by historic distortions and important, excuse me, sunny California. Yeah, I'm going back to Georgia. All right, you all got Regan, I got Maddox. The only difference is Maddox got a bigger head and he can swing with Humphrey. 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 conscienceless power. I would like to repeat that phrase because I think it is axiomatic to race relations in the country today. We are faced now with a situation where powerless conscience meets conscienceless power, threatening the very foundations of our nation. We deplore 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. America has, without the capacity to participate with power, that is 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. All right, CIA, you keep it up. 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 into America's pluralistic society has been through the organization of their own institutions with which to represent their communal needs within the larger society. Simply stated, this is what the advocates of black power are saying. The strident outcry, particularly from the liberal community that has been evoked by this proposal, can only be understood by examining the historic relationship between black people and white power in this country. Blacks are defined by two forces, our blackness and our powerlessness. There have been traditionally two communities in America, the white community, which controls and defines the forms that all institutions within the society would take, and the black community, which has been excluded from participation in the power decisions that shape 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 black community in its condition of dependence and oppression. This has not been on the level of individual acts of discrimination between individual whites against individual blacks, but as total acts by the white community against the black 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. Let me give an example of the difference between individual acts of racism and institutionalized racism and the society's response to both. When unidentified white monkeys bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism widely deplored by most segments of the society, white and black. But when in that same city, Birmingham, Alabama, not five, but 500 black babies died each year because of lack of proper food, shelter, and medical facilities, and thousands more are maimed physically, emotionally, and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and deprivation in the ghetto. That is a function of institutionalized racism. That's important. We gonna take care of individual acts of racism from this day on. But the society either pretends it doesn't know of this situation or is incapable of doing anything meaningful about it. and this resistance to doing anything meaningful about conditions in the ghetto comes from the fact that the ghetto is itself a product of a combination of forces and special interests inside the white community and the groups that have access to the resources and power to change that situation benefit politically and economically from the existence of the ghetto It is more than a figure of speech to say then that the black community in America is the victim of white imperialism and colonial exploitation. This is in practical, economic, and political terms true. For philosophy students, it would be called a truism. There are over 20 million black people compromising 10% of this nation. For the most part, we live in well-defined areas of the country, in the shanty towns and rural black belt areas of the south, and increasingly in the slums of northern and western industrial cities. If one goes into any black community, whether it be Jackson, Mississippi, Cambridge, Maryland, or Watts in Los Angeles, one will find that the same combination of political, economic, and social forces are at work. The people in the black community do not control the resources of that community. Its political decisions, its law enforcement, its housing standards, even the physical ownership of the land, houses, and stores lie outside that community. 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 black people in this country live in these captive communities and must endure these conditions of oppression because and only because we are black and powerless. I do not suppose that at any point the men who control the power and resources of this country ever sat down and designed these black enclaves and formally articulated the terms of their colonial and dependent status as was done for example by the apartheid government of South Africa which this country supports Yet one cannot distinguish between one ghetto and another. As one moves from city to city, It is as though some malignant racist planning unit had done precisely this, designed each one from the same master blueprint. And indeed, if the ghetto had been formally and deliberately planned, instead of growing spontaneously and inevitably from the racist functioning of the various institutions that combined to make the society, the situation would be somehow less frightening. The situation would be less frightening because if these ghettos were the result of design and conspiracy, one could understand their similarity as being artificial and consciously imposed qualities, rather than the result of identical patterns of white racism which repeat themselves in cities as distant as Boston is to Watts. Without bothering to list the historic factors which 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 is, of course, what kinds of changes are necessary and how is it possible to bring them about? In recent years, the answer to these questions, which has been given by a most articulate group of black people 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, and I quote, integrating the Negro into the mainstream institutions of the society from which he has been traditionally excluded, end of quote. It is very significant that each time I've heard this formulation, it has been in terms of the Negro, the individual Negro, rather than in terms of the entire black community. This concept of integration had to be based on the assumption that there was nothing of value in the black community and that little of value could be created among black people. So the thing to do was to siphon off the acceptable black people into the surrounding middle class white community. Thus, the goal of the movement for integration was simply to loosen up the restrictions barring the entry of black people into the white community. Goals around which the struggle took place, such as public accommodation, open housing, job opportunity on the executive level, are quite simply middle class goals articulated by a tiny group of black people who had middle class inspirations. Now, I believe that the Editorial Twins, again, had something to do with that. Excuse me. I used to watch television when the Editorial Twins would be on, and let's say there'd be a demonstration in Alabama. They would say, Black people are marching today in Selma, Alabama. Jim Clark has beaten them up, he's ridden them down with horses, he's got out his cattle prods, his hoses, he's shot at them, but they're still marching to integrate. Then the next day they say, they have been joined today by other people from the north who have come down to help them. They have been beaten again by Jim Clark. They have been ridden over with horses, water hoses, cattle prods, but they're still marching to integrate. So I said, now logically that means that I left New York, came to Alabama to sit next to Jim Clark's mama, you know. See, I didn't go to Alabama to sit next to Jim Clark. I went to render that hunky impotent over my life. There's a big difference. Because in the first, you're fighting to sit next to somebody. In the second, you're fighting against white supremacy. And that's the fight black people have been waging in this country. A fight against white supremacy. And that's very important. i don't want to sit next to jim clark he's uncivilized but now the country had to say that because they couldn't admit that in the land of the home the free and the brave and all that other junk that there existed white people who had power who were white supremacists. So what they had to say was that these black people, although they're getting beaten, they still love us white folk. And it was really consistent because they always see us as a biblical people, you know, very religious. It comes right out of the Bible. Job said it, though you may slay us, yet will we serve you. Yeah. Yeah, we've been digging revelations this time around. Such a limited class orientation was reflected not only in the program and goals of the civil rights movement, but in its tactics and organizations. It is very significant that the two oldest and most respectable civil rights organizations have consta... consta... I'm sorry, I can only say three-fifths of that word. Let's look at... Constitutions.

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Stokely Carmichael: When we become five-fifths, we'll be able to say the whole word. But anyway, they have those things, you know, which specifically prohibit partisan political activity. CORE once did, but changed that clause when it changed its orientation towards black power. But this is perfectly understandable in terms of the strategy and goals of our older organizations. The civil rights movement saw its role as a kind of liaison between the powerful white community and the dependent black community. The dependent status of the black community apparently was unimportant since, if the movement were 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 black community, but only in appealing to the conscience of white institutions of power within the white community. 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, by forming coalitions with various liberal pressure organizations inside the white community, such as liberal reform clubs, labor unions, church groups, progressive civic groups, and at times one or other of the major political parties, influence national legislation and national social patterns. I think we've all 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 conscience outside their own special interest. The political and social rights of black people 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, the philosopher Santayana reminds us, then we are doomed to repeat it. And this is precisely the lesson that black people must learn from the Reconstruction period. During that period, there came into being in the South a party known as the Populist Party. One of its leading exponents was a man by the name of Thomas Watson. Mr. Watson wanted to run for a position in which the population of the county was 50% black and 50% white. In order to win, he needed the 50% black vote. So Mr. Watson began to articulate a liberal philosophy which would bring the black people into his party. We see that today. Some people who want to be president in 1972 are running around exposing liberal nonsense which they don't even believe. Now after black people came into Mr. Watson's party, he tried to make his party national. and he decided to advance into the West because the party was not strong enough in the South to take on the industrial East. When he expanded into the West, the economic interest of the farmers conflicted with the economic interest of black people. Mr. Watson turned around and became a racist, himself leading lynch mobs and driving black people out of the Populist Party. Now this is very important because both these decisions were made by a white man. without any black people having anything to say about the decision decision for them to vote in his party and the decision for them to leave his party and this was done before any organization powerful enough in the black community in the south could be developed to stop or to check that decision today as we move we will not be able to make that mistake we must develop ourselves independently so that if at least we can't stop the decisions that affect our lives we can begin to disrupt the entire country Thus, at this point in the struggle, black people have no assurance save a kind of idiot optimism and fate 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 sentiment should occur. The major limitation of this approach was that it tended to maintain the traditional dependence of black people and of the movement. We depended upon the goodwill and support of various groups within the white community whose interests were not always compatible with ours. To the extent that we depended upon the goodwill and support of these groups, we were dominated by their influence. Also, The program that evolved out of this coalition was really limited and inadequate in the long terms, and one which affected only a small select group of black people. Its goal was to make the white community accessible to qualified blacks. And presumably, each year, a few more black people, armed with their passports, a couple of university degrees, would escape into white middle-class America, adopt the attitudes and lifestyles of that group, and one day, the Harlem's and the Watts would stand empty, a tribute to the success of integration. this is simply neither realistic nor is it particularly desirable you can integrate 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 race problem in this country. Karl Marx reminds us that the working class is the first class of people that wish to abolish itself. If you were to listen closely to some of our moderate, so-called Negro leaders, you would think that black people were the first people that wished to abolish themselves. The fact is, what must be abolished is not the black community, but the dependent colonial status that has been inflicted upon it, the racial status. The racial and cultural personality of the black community must be preserved and the community must win its liberation while preserving its cultural integrity. This is the essential difference between integration as it is currently practiced and the concept of black power. And what has the movement for integration accomplished to date? that the black person graduating from UCLA with a doctorate degree will have better job opportunities available to him than to Linda Bird Johnson. But the rate of unemployment in the black community is steadily increasing, while that in the white community decreases. More educated blacks hold executive jobs in major corporations and federal agencies than ever before. But the but the gap between white income and black income has almost doubled in the last 20 years. More suburban housing is available to black people if they can stand the rocks, but housing conditions in the ghettos are steadily declining. While the infant mortality rate of the city of New York is at its lowest point ever, the infant mortality rate of Harlem is steadily climbing. There has been an organized national resistance to the Supreme Court order to integrate the schools. And we ought to make it clear that less than 6% of the students in the South attend integrated schools. And they attend those schools at a great price to themselves, to their dignity, and to their people. And what the country is able to do is to allow everybody to focus their attention on 6% of the children and leave 94% of our children still in overcrowded, inadequate schools. It's time that we turn our attention to the 94% of our youth. If white people want to integrate, they know where to come and get integration. They've always known where to come after sundown. This explains why the rate of school dropouts is increasing among black teenagers who then express their bitterness, hopelessness, and alienation by the only means they have, violence, by imitating this society. As long as we in the ghettos of our large cities feel that we are the victims of the misuse of white power without any way to have our needs represented, and these are frequently simple needs, we will continue to have rebellions. These are not the products of black power, but the absence of any organization capable of giving the community the power, the black power that it needs to deal with its problems. SNCC proposes that it's now time for the black liberation movement to stop pandering to the fears and anxieties of the white middle class in an attempt to earn its goodwill and to return to the ghetto to organize these communities to control themselves. This organization must be attempted in the 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, to which Bobby Kennedy is a member, and in the North, the equally corrupt and just as racist big city machines. The standard argument presented against independent political organization is, but you're only 10%. I cannot see the relevance of this observation since no one is talking about taking over the country but taking control over our very communities. The fact is that the black population, 10% or not, is very strategically placed, ironically, because of segregation. What is also true is that black people have never been able to utilize the full voting potential of our numbers. Where we could vote, the case has always been that the white political machine stacks and gerrymanders the political subdivision in the black neighborhoods so that true voting strength is never reflected in political strength. Would anyone looking at the distribution of political power in Manhattan ever think that black people represented 60% of the population there? Just as often, effective political organizations in the black communities absorbed by tokenism and patronage, the time-honored practice of giving certain offices to selected black people. The machine thus creates a little machine which is subordinate and responsive to it inside the black community. These so-called Negro political leaders are really boat deliverers, more responsible to the white community and the white power structure than to the community they allegedly represent. Thus, the white community is able to substitute patronage control for what Congressman Powell calls audacious black power in our communities. This is precisely what LBJ tried to do even before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. The National Democrats made it clear, crystal clear, that the measure was intended to register Democrats, not blacks. The presidents and top officials of the Democratic Party called in almost 100 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 and Laurene Wallace in Alabama. Incidentally, we come to find out that the governor of Alabama is a mother. Applause And we're for motherhood and SNCC. What was simply said to these Negro leaders by the president in our quote was, go home and organize your people into the local Democratic Party. Then we'll see about poverty, money, and appointments, my fellow Americans. We will organize black community power to end these abuses and to give the black community a chance to have its needs expressed. A leadership which is truly responsible not to the white press and the white power structure but to the community will 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 a 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 black power. The single aspect then 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, or a withdrawal into black nationalism which yields to reverse racism. If such a program is developed, it will not have the effect of isolating the black community, but the reverse. When the black 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's no reason why it should not operate here. The only difference is that we will have a say in those alliances. The next question usually is, so, can it work? Can the ghettos in fact be organized? The answer is that this organization will 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. Integration, we have seen, is meaningful only to a small chosen class within the community. The revolution in agricultural technology in the South is displacing the rural black community into northern urban areas. Both Washington, D.C. and Newark, New Jersey already have black majorities. One-third of Philadelphia's population of two million people is already black. The inner city in most major urban areas is already predominantly black. And with the white rush to suburbia, Blacks will in the next two decades control the hearts of our great cities. These areas can become either concentration camps with a bitter population whose only power is the power to destroy, which we will use, or they can become organized and powerful communities able to make constructive contributions to the total society without the power the black power to control our lives and our communities without effective political institutions through which to relate to the total societies, our communities will exist in a constant state of insurrection. This is a choice that white America will have to make. Thank you. The first question is, what is the origin of the phrase black power? When did you first hear it? When did you first use it? I don't know what the origin is. I've always heard the phrase ever since I was a child. And it's always come to mean the power of black people to me. So I've been using it quite a bit. The press picked it up on the Mississippi march. I guess that answers the question. Mr. Richard Wright wrote a book in 1954 entitled Black Power. Considering that black people compromise only 10% of the United States population, how can black people achieve significant power without the active support of non-blacks? Oh, that's very easy. The power to disrupt is the most powerful power that we have in our possessions. We feel that the demands that we make are quite just, and white America is unjust, and we're gonna get those demands by any means necessary. That's the same thing that a white boy said during the American Revolution. He said, give me liberty or give me death. Everybody claps for that. I do believe that black people can take control of their own communities. There's no reason for hunky cops to be in Watts. Seems to me the black people are asking to control the police force in the communities where they live. We don't patrol in the suburbs. We don't want you in the ghettos. And if you can't get those demands, we're just going to have to move on to TCB. Do you feel that your cause might be more forceful if you went to Vietnam and upon first-hand inspection of the problem made your decision whether to continue your present course of opposition to the war and the alleged discrimination of it against the Negro? We have had several people in organizations who have been to Vietnam, have made those investigations and have returned. I speak from an organizational point of view, never an individual point of view. We know what's going down in Vietnam. We don't need to go. Because anytime the man is drafting 30% of us, that's black urban removal. And we're just not concerned about the Vietnam War per se. We are concerned about the survival of black people in this country. And that we cannot survive if we go fight some yellow man in Vietnam who ain't never called us nigger. Yeah. Nigger. Nigger. Secondly, I don't see how anybody can ask black people to go fight for the liberation of certain people across the seas when we don't even know what liberation is all about here in this country. It is crystal clear to us in SNCC that the people who are fighting the war in Vietnam is fighting a war for the control of the resources of Vietnam so they can get an extra red China. That's their war, not ours. Let them fight it. Five years ago, Vietnam used to export rice. It was the world's leading exporter of rice. Today, she buys rice from the United States of America. But let me get you some quotes. This is a book entitled Vietnam, Vietnam by Mr. Felix Green. I want you to dig something. I want to read a quote concerning the Vietnam War which was made August 4th, 1953 in Seattle, Washington before a conference of U.S. state governors. I'll read the quote and then I'll tell you who said it. Quote, now let us assume that we lost Indochina. Now, we weren't fighting the war then. The French were fighting it for us. We were giving them 80% of it. The tin and tungsten that we so greatly valued from that area would cease coming. So when the United States votes $400 million to help that war, we're not voting a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can to prevent the occurrence of something that would be of the most terrible significance to the United States of America. our security, our power, and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indo-Chinese territory and from Southeast Asia. That quote was made by the white leader of the world then, President Dwight Eisenhower. But now we would say Dwight wasn't really too smart. As a matter of fact, he couldn't even really articulate well and said whatever came to his mind. In our community, because of his Ability to articulate we used to call him the white Joe Louis da da da da glad I win. I'll be right home mama And after all people say well, that's 1954 and I know how this country is we're always wrong in the past But we're willing to make amends in the future, you know, yeah, I hear that junk dig this Henry Cabot Lodge Ex-ambassador former ambassador to South Vietnam a year ago in Boston. Let me quote geographically Vietnam stands at the hub of a vast area of the world, Southeast Asia, an area with a population of 249 million persons. He who holds or has influence in Vietnam can affect the future of the Philippines and Formosa to the east, Thailand and Burma with their huge rice surpluses to the west, and Malaysia and Indonesia with their rubber, ore, and tin to the south. Vietnam, thus, does not exist in a geographical vacuum. From its large storehouses of wealth and population can be influenced and undermanned. That's what the war is all about. But finally, it is inconsistent of this country to ask black people to be non-violent against Jim Clark and to be violent against brown people in Vietnam. We ain't going. We ain't going. The decision to kill is the highest decision that a man can make. It must be an individual choice. It cannot be a mass choice. I will not let anybody define for me who my enemy is. My fellow Americans, your enemy is the Viet Cong. Go kill them. Junk. That's a lot of junk. I will decide who my enemy is, and I will decide when to kill him. Because that's... because that's... If Westmoreland, if Ross, if McNamara, if Johnson think the Viet Cong are their enemies, let them go kill them. Them go kill them. Them go kill them. If the veterans from foreign wars didn't have enough and they want to go back for some more, let them go to Vietnam. Let them go to Vietnam. If the American Legion feels that the Vietnamese are their enemies, let them go and bomb the Vietnamese. I will maintain my humanity. I will not kill when someone tells me to kill. Mine is not to do and die. Mine is but to reason why. And I'm going to do that till I die. We have grown enough strength to say, you know, that Vietnam War is for the birds. Linda Bird, Lady Bird, Luda Bird. Let the birds go take care of it. We're going to sit here and watch. I'm going to smoke cigarettes and dig Captain Kangaroo on TV. Do you believe Adam Powell has acted improperly as a congressman? Nope. What are your views on interracial marriage? Yeah. I don't know about this interracial thing, but this marriage thing makes me do flips. I think maybe in SNCC you might slide with that interracial thing, but that marriage thing, we're against that. We think interracial, we're against marriage. Now, seriously speaking, I think that the question of marriage is an individual question. And that is up to the individuals who are getting married. I just hope with the rates of rising divorce that they find happiness and love in a world as confused as is today. Do you believe violence is a prerequisite for the attainment of the Negro's goals? Well, that question isn't really for... Oh, what will happen when and if all these Negro soldiers return home from Vietnam and find poverty remains as well as lack of job opportunities? Revolution, violence, or silence? It ain't going to be silence. The question of whether or not violence is going to be used is not a question for the black community. It's a question for white America. Because white America is the one who's used violence. For 400 years, we have been the recipients of violence. We have never lynched, we have never shot, we've never burned a church, we've never beaten people, we've never taken them to jail. That is the question for white America. The real question is can she civilize herself before we get ready to civilize her? So that's a question you'd have to ask somebody white like Lyndon Johnson. He knows a lot about violence. Will the Negro's power gains help other minorities, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, et cetera? If so, how? Most certainly, first international pact was made with FUPI and MPI of Puerto Rico. The Puerto Ricans are fighting for independence. They want the right to govern their country. But you know how this country is. We just want to safeguard until everybody's ready. So Puerto Ricans aren't ready yet, so they're going to hold the Puerto Ricans against their will. They're like the Vietnamese. Well, they don't understand democracy. How could they deal with it? And I'm digging this hunky up here. He don't know nothing about democracy. He's telling the Vietnamese they don't understand democracy. Yeah, dig that. Yeah, we're going to make an alliance with the Puerto Ricans. The Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico are drafted, even though they're not citizens of this country. This country is the only imperialist power that ever drafted its colonies. Other people at least paid them a decent salary and made them mercenaries. So we're allying with the Puerto Ricans on an anti-draft issue. They ain't going either. They're going to stay home in Puerto Rico. And with the Mexicans brewing down the coast and with the red people across the country getting ready to go to work, I think the time might be right. We sure enough gonna come together now. Take care of this man. So that the question is, yes, we're gonna be moving around with all the minority groups and hooking up with them because we all suffer from the same common oppressor. The same man that oppresses Vietnam is the same man oppressing me. The same man oppressing South Africa is the same man oppressing me.

Speaker 1: Thank you.