|
Books by Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture
Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely
Carmichael (Kwame Ture) /
Black-Power:The Politics of Liberation
Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism
* *
* * *
Black
Power
By Stokely Carmichael
The Black Power movement in the US is
exposing the extent of the racism and exploitation which
permeates all the institutions in the country. It has unique
appeal to young black students on campuses across the US. These
students have been deluded by the fiction in white America that
if the black man would educate himself and behave himself, he
would be acceptable enough to leave the ranks of the oppressed
and have tea with the Queen.
However, this year, when provoked by savage
white policemen, students on many campuses fought back, whereas
before they had accepted these incidents without rebellion. As
students are a part of these rebellions, they begin to realize
that white America might let a very few of them escape, one by
one, into the mainstream of a society, but as soon as black move
in concert around their blackness she will reply with the fury
which reveals her true racist nature.
It is necessary, then, to understand that our
analysis of the US and international capitalism is one that
begins in race. Color and culture were, and are, key factors in
our oppression. Therefore our analysis of history and our
economic analysis are rooted in these concepts. Our historical
analysis for example views the US as being conceived in racism.
Although the first settlers themselves were
escaping from oppression, and although their armed uprising
against their mother country was around the aggravation of
colonialism, and their slogan was “no taxation without
representation,” the white European settlers could not extend
their lofty theories of democracy to the red men, whom they
systematically exterminated as they expanded into the territory
of the country which belonged to the red men.
Indeed, in the same town in which the
settlers set up their model of government based on the theory of
representative democracy, the first slaves were brought from
Africa. In the writings of the glorious Constitution,
guaranteeing “life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness” and
all that other garbage, these were rights for white men only,
for the black man was counted as three fifths of a person. If
you read the US Constitution, you will see that this clause is
still in there to this very day—that the black man was three
fifths of a man.
It was because white America needed cheap or
free labor that she raped our African homeland of millions of
black people. Because we were black and considered inferior by
Americans and Europeans, our enslavement was justified and
rationalized by the so-called white Christians, who attempted to
explain their crimes by spouting lies about civilizing the
heathens, pagans, savages from Africa, whom they portrayed as
being “better off” in the Americas than they were in their
homeland. These circumstances laid the systematic base and
framework for the racism which has become institutionalized in
white American society.
In our economic analysis, our interpretation
of Marx comes not only from his writing, but, as we see it, from
the relationship of capitalistic countries to people of color
around the world. Now I’m going to show what happens when
people in a white country in the West organize themselves when
they’re oppressed.
I want to use the Labor Movement in the US
because it’s always quoted around the world as the real
movement, or friend, of the black man, who is going to be able
to help him. This is true for all other little white countries
when the white workers organize—here’s how they get out of
the bind.
The Labor Movement of the US—while in the
beginning certainly some of their great leaders in the struggle
were against the absolute control of the economy by the
industrial lords—essentially fought only for money. And that
has been the fight of white workers in the West. The fight for
one thing—more money. Those few who had visions of extending
the fight for workers’ control of production never succeeded
in transmitting their entire vision to the rank and file. The
labor Movement found itself asking the industrial lords, not to
give up their control, but merely to pass out a few more of the
fruits of this control.
Thereby did the US anticipate the prophecy of
Marx, and avoided the inevitable class struggle within the
country by expanding into the Third World and exploiting the
resources and slave labor of people of color. Britain, France,
did the same thing. US capitalists never cut down on their
profits to the American working class, who lapped them up. The
American working class enjoys the fruits of the labors of the
Third World, and the bourgeoise is white western society.
And to show how that works—and not only how
it works just in terms of the bourgeoise—I’ve watched the
relationships of whites to whites who are communist, and whites
to non-whites whom they call communist. Now every time the US
wants to take somebody’s country, they get up and say
“Communists are invading them and terrorist guerilla warfare
is on the way, and we must protect democracy, so send thousands
of troops to Vietnam to kill the Communists.”
Italy is a white country. Over one third of
its population is communist. Why doesn’t the US invade Italy?
Tito is an acknowledged communist. The US gives him aid. Why
don’t they invade Tito’s country, if they really care about
stopping communism? The US is not kidding anybody. When they
want to take over somebody’s land who is non-white, they talk
about communist aggression—that’s what they did in Cuba, in
Santo Domingo, and it’s what they’re doing in Vietnam.
They’re always telling people how they’re going to stop them
from going communist.
And don’t talk about dictatorship. Franco
is perhaps the worst dictator in the world today, but the US
gives him aid.
So that it is clear it is not a question of
communist invasion; it’s really a question of being able to
take the countries they want most from the people, and the
countries they want most are obviously the non-white countries
because that is where the resources of the world today. That’s
where they have been for the last few centuries. And that’s
why white western society has to be there. . . .
*
* *
The US knows about law and order, it doesn’t
know about justice. It is for white western society to talk about
law and order. It is for the Third World to talk about justice. .
. .
*
* *
We are working to increase the revolutionary
consciousness of black people in America to join with the Third
World. Whether or not violence is used is not decided by us, it is
decided by the white West. We are fighting a political warfare.
Politics is war without violence. War is politics with violence.
The white West will make the decision on how they want the
political war to be fought. We are not any longer going to bow our
heads to any white man. If he touches one black man in the US, he
is going to go to war with every black man in the US.
We are going to extend our fight
internationally and we are going to hook up with the Third World.
It is the only salvation—we are fighting to save our humanity.
We are indeed fighting to save the humanity of the world, which
the West has failed miserably in being able to preserve. And the
fight must be waged from the Third World. There will be new
speakers. They will be Che, they will be Mao, they will be Fanon.
You can have Rousseau, you can have Marx, you can even have the
great libertarian John Stuart Mill.
*
* *
Black Power, to us, means that black people see
themselves as a part of the new force, sometimes called the Third
World; that we see our struggle as closely related to liberation
struggles around the world. We must hook up with these struggles.
We must, for example, ask ourselves: when black people in Africa
begin to storm Johnnesburg, what will be the reaction of the US?
What will be the role of the West, and what will be the role of
black people living inside the US? It seems inevitable that the US
will move to protect its financial interests in South Africa,
which means protecting the white rule in South Africa, as England
has already done.
Black people in the US have the responsibility
to oppose, and if not oppose, certainly to neutralize the effort
by white America. This is but one example of many such situations
which have already arisen around the world; there are more to
come.
There is but one place for black Americans in
these struggles, and that is one the side of the Third World.
Now I want to draw two conclusions. I want to
give a quote from Fanon. Frantz Fanon in the Wretched of the Earth
puts forth clearly the reasons for this, and the relationships of
the concept called Black Power to the concept of a new force in
the world.
This is Fanon’s quote:
| Let us decide not to imitate Europe. Let us try
to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of
bringing to triumphant birth. Two centuries ago a former European
colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that
the USA became a monster in which the taints, the sickness, and
the inhumanity of Europe has grown to appalling dimensions.
The
Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass, whose aim
should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not
been able to find the answers. It is a question of the Third World
starting a new history of man, a history which will have regard to
the sometimes prodigious thesis which Europe has put forward, but
which will also not forget Europe’s crimes, of which the most
horrible was committed in the heart of man and consisted of the
pathological tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away
of his unity. |
No, there is no question of a return to nature.
It is simply a very concrete question of not dragging men towards
mutilation, of not imposing upon the brain rhythms which very
quickly obliterates it and wreck it. The pretext of catching up
must not be used for pushing men around, to tear him away from
himself or from his privacy, to break and to kill him.
No, we do not want to catch up with anyone.
What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day,
in the company of man, in the company of all men.
* * * *
*
So the psychologists ought to stop
investigating and examining people of color, they ought to
investigate and examine their own corrupt society. That’s where
they belong. And once they are able to do that, then maybe we can
move on to build in the Third World.
I want to conclude, then, by reading a poem
that was written by a young man who works in SNCC, the
organization for which I work. His name is Worth Long. It’s
called "Arson and Cold Grace, or How I Yearn to Burn Baby,
Burn.”
* * * * *
|
Arson and Cold Grace,
or How I Yearn to Burn Baby, Burn
By Worth Long
We have found you out, four face
Americas, we have found you out.
We have found you out, false faced
farmers, we have found you out.
The sparks of suspicion are melting
your waters
And waters can’t drown them, the
fires are burning
And firemen can’t calm them with
falsely appeasing
And preachers can’t pray with
hopes for deceiving
Nor leaders deliver a lecture on
losing
Nor teachers inform them the chosen
are choosing
For now is the fire and fires
won’t answer
To logical reason and hopefully
seeming
Hot flames must devour the kneeling
and feeling
And torture the masters whose idiot
pleading
Get lost in the echoes of dancing
and bleeding.
We have found you out, four faced
farmers, we have found you out.
We have found you out, four faced America, we have found you
out. |
Source:
To Free a Generation: The
Dialectics of Liberation, edited by David Cooper. London: Collier
Books, 1969. * * * *
*
|
Stokely Speaks; Black Power Back to
Pan-Africanism
By Stokely Carmichael
Stokely
Standiford Churchill Carmichael—(June 29, 1941 -
November 15, 1998), also known as Kwame Ture, was a
Trinidadian-American black activist active in the
1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to
prominence first as a leader of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced
"Snick") and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister"
of the Black Panther Party. Initially an
integrationist, Carmichael later became affiliated
with black nationalist and Pan-Africanist movements.
He popularized the term "Black Power."
In 1965, working as an SNCC activist in Lowndes
County, Alabama, Carmichael helped to increase the
number of registered black voters from 70 to 2,60 —
300 more than the number of registered white voters. |
 |
Black residents and voters
organized and widely supported the Lowndes County Freedom
Organization, a party that had the black panther as its mascot,
over the white dominated local Democratic Party, whose mascot
was a white rooster. Although black residents and voters
outnumber whites in Lowndes, they lost the county wide election
of 1965.
Carmichael became chairman of SNCC later in 1966, taking over
from John Lewis. A few weeks after Carmichael took office, James
Meredith was attacked with a shotgun during his solitary "March
Against Fear". Carmichael joined Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Floyd McKissick, Cleveland Sellers, and others to continue
Meredith's march. He was arrested once again during the march
and, upon his release, he gave his first "Black Power" speech,
using the phrase to urge black pride and socio-economic
independence:
"It is a call for black
people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to
build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to
define their own goals, to lead their own organizations."
While Black Power was not a new concept, Carmichael's speech
brought it into the spotlight and it became a rallying cry for
young African Americans across the country. According to Stokely
Carmichael : "Black Power meant black people coming together to
form a political force and either electing representatives or
forcing their representatives to speak their needs [rather than
relying on established parties]. Heavily influenced by the work
of Frantz Fanon and his landmark book Wretched of the Earth,
along with others such as Malcolm X, under Carmichael's
leadership SNCC gradually became more radical and focused on
Black Power as its core goal and ideology. This became most
evident during the controversial Atlanta Project in 1966.
SNCC, under the local
leadership of Bill Ware, engaged in a voter drive to promote the
candidacy of Julian Bond for the Georgia State Legislature in an
Atlanta district. However, unlike previous SNCC activities—like
the 1961 Freedom Rides or the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer —
Ware excluded Northern white SNCC members from the drive.
Initially, Carmichael opposed this move and voted it down, but
he eventually changed his mind. When, at the urging of the
Atlanta Project, the issue of whites in SNCC came up for a vote,
Carmichael ultimately sided with those calling for the expulsion
of whites, reportedly to encourage whites to begin organizing
poor white southern communities while SNCC would continue to
focus on promoting African American self reliance through Black
Power.
Carmichael saw nonviolence as a tactic as opposed to a
principle, which separated him from moderate civil rights
leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.. Carmichael became critical
of civil rights leaders who simply called for the integration of
African Americans into existing institutions of the middle class
mainstream.
Stokely
Carmichael—Black Power Speech
* *
* * *
Black
Power, A Critique of the System
/
Black
Power / What We Want
Amite
County Beginning
Kish Mir Tuchas
A
Tribute to Kwame Toure/Stokely Carmichael
* *
* * *
|
African Revolutions
By
Mukoma wa Ngugi
Her womb pressed against the desert to
bear the parasite
that eats her insides like termites
drill into dry wood.
He is born into an empty bowl, fist
choking umbilical cord.
She dies sighing, child son at last. He
couldn't have known,
instinct told him - always raise your
arm in defense of your
own -Strike! Strike until they are all
dead! Egg shells
in your hands milk bottle held between
your toes,
you have been anointed twice, you strong
enough to kill
at birth and survive. You will want to
name the world
after yourself but you will have no
name- a collage of dead
roots, tongues and other things. You
will point your sword
to the center of the earth, duel the
world to split into perfect
mirrors after your imperfect mutations
but you will be
too weak having latched your self onto
too many streams
straddling too many continents, pulling
patches of a self
as one does fruits from an from an
orchard, building a home
of planks with many faces. How does one
look into a mirror
with a face that washes clean every
rainy season?
He has an identity for every occasion -
here he is Lenin
there Jesus and yesterday Marx -
inflexible truths inherited
without roots. To be nothing to remain
nothing, to kill
at birth - such love can only drink from
our wrists. We
storming from our past to Jo'Burg eating
wisdom of others
building homes made of our grandparent's
bones. We
gathering momentum that eats out of our
earth, We standing
pens and bullets hurled at you, your
enemies. Comrade, there
are many ways to die. A dog dies never
having known
why it lived but a free death belongs to
a life lived in roots,
roots not afraid of growing where they
stand, roots tapped all over
the earth. Comrade,
for a tree to grow, it must first own
its earth.
Source:
Zeleza |
* * * *
*
 |
Stokely Carmichael,
"Black Power"—Kalen M. A. Churcher—Speaking
at Morgan State College in Baltimore on
January 28, 1967, Carmichael displayed the
very different style he used when addressing
a predominantly black audience. Joking about
how he partied at the school and
participated in a sit-in near campus when he
was younger, he also gave his audience at
Morgan State a serious charge: overcoming
the negative connotations of "black" that he
had talked about in Berkeley. "If you want
to stop rebellion," he said, "then eradicate
the cause."
Carmichael then spoke of
their responsibilities as leaders and
intellectuals within the black community:
"It is time for you to stop running away
from being black. You are college students,
you should think. It is time for you to
begin to understand that you, as the growing
intellectuals, the black intellectuals of
the country, must begin to define beauty for
black people."— Stokely
Carmichael, "At Morgan State," in
Stokely Speaks; Black Power Back to
Pan-Africanism, ed. E.N.
Minor (New York: Random House, 1966),
61-76.—Archive |
* *
* * *
|
Stokely Speaks; Black Power Back to
Pan-Africanism
By Stokely Carmichael
Stokely
Standiford Churchill Carmichael—(June 29, 1941 -
November 15, 1998), also known as Kwame Ture, was a
Trinidadian-American black activist active in the
1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to
prominence first as a leader of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced
"Snick") and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister"
of the Black Panther Party. Initially an
integrationist, Carmichael later became affiliated
with black nationalist and Pan-Africanist movements.
He popularized the term "Black Power."
In 1965, working as an SNCC activist in Lowndes
County, Alabama, Carmichael helped to increase the
number of registered black voters from 70 to 2,60 —
300 more than the number of registered white voters. Black residents and voters
organized and widely supported the Lowndes County Freedom
Organization, a party that had the black panther as its mascot,
over the white dominated local Democratic Party, whose mascot
was a white rooster. Although black residents and voters
outnumber whites in Lowndes, they lost the county wide election
of 1965. |
|
Carmichael became chairman of SNCC later in 1966, taking over
from John Lewis. A few weeks after Carmichael took office, James
Meredith was attacked with a shotgun during his solitary "March
Against Fear". Carmichael joined Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Floyd McKissick, Cleveland Sellers, and others to continue
Meredith's march. He was arrested once again during the march
and, upon his release, he gave his first "Black Power" speech,
using the phrase to urge black pride and socio-economic
independence:
"It is a call for black
people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to
build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to
define their own goals, to lead their own organizations."
While Black Power was not a new concept, Carmichael's speech
brought it into the spotlight and it became a rallying cry for
young African Americans across the country. According to Stokely
Carmichael : "Black Power meant black people coming together to
form a political force and either electing representatives or
forcing their representatives to speak their needs [rather than
relying on established parties]. Heavily influenced by the work
of Frantz Fanon and his landmark book Wretched of the Earth,
along with others such as Malcolm X, under Carmichael's
leadership SNCC gradually became more radical and focused on
Black Power as its core goal and ideology. This became most
evident during the controversial Atlanta Project in 1966.
SNCC, under the local
leadership of Bill Ware, engaged in a voter drive to promote the
candidacy of Julian Bond for the Georgia State Legislature in an
Atlanta district. However, unlike previous SNCC activities—like
the 1961 Freedom Rides or the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer —
Ware excluded Northern white SNCC members from the drive.
Initially, Carmichael opposed this move and voted it down, but
he eventually changed his mind. When, at the urging of the
Atlanta Project, the issue of whites in SNCC came up for a vote,
Carmichael ultimately sided with those calling for the expulsion
of whites, reportedly to encourage whites to begin organizing
poor white southern communities while SNCC would continue to
focus on promoting African American self reliance through Black
Power.
Carmichael saw nonviolence as a tactic as opposed to a
principle, which separated him from moderate civil rights
leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.. Carmichael became critical
of civil rights leaders who simply called for the integration of
African Americans into existing institutions of the middle class
mainstream.
Stokely
Carmichael—Black Power Speech
* *
* * *
|
Wild Women Don’t Have the
Blues
By Ida Cox
I hear these women raving 'bout their
monkey men
About their fighting husbands and their
no good friends
These poor women sit around all day and
moan
Wondering why their wandering papas
don't come home
But wild women don't worry, wild women
don't have the blues.
Now when you've got a man, don't ever be
on the square
'Cause if you do he'll have a woman
everywhere
I never was known to treat no one man
right
I keep 'em working hard both day and
night
because wild women don't worry, wild
women don't have no blues.
I've got a disposition and a way of my
own
When my man starts kicking I let him
find another home
I get full of good liquor, walk the
streets all night
Go home and put my man out if he don't
act right
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have no blues
You never get nothing by being an angel
child
You better change your ways and get real
wild
I wanna tell you something, I wouldn't
tell you no lie
Wild women are the only kind that ever
get by
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have no blues.
Born
Ida
Prather,25 February 1896 in Toccoa,
Habersham County, Georgia, United
States. Died 10 November 1967 (aged 71)
Genres Jazz, Blues Instruments Vocalist. |
* *
* * *
What We Want
By Stokely Carmichael
A
Christian Goon Squad in Black Baltimore
Clarence Logan and the Northwood Movement
/
Reverend
Marion Bascom Civilrighting
Roy Wilkins and Spiro Agnew in
Annapolis /
Agnew Speaks to Black
Baltimore Leaders 1968
* *
* * *
Walter Hall Lively
Forty Years of Determined Struggle
Putting
Baltimore's People First
Dominance of Johns Hopkins
A Brief Economic History of Modern Baltimore
Understanding the Monumental City: A
Bibliographic Essay on Baltimore History (Richard
J. Cox)
* *
* * *
The End of Black Rage? Class and Delusion in
Black America (Jared Ball)
The Black Generation Gap (Ellis Cose)
* *
* * *
 |
John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk
This
video chronicles the life and times of the
noted African-American historian, scholar
and Pan-African activist
John Henrik Clarke
(1915-1998). Both a biography of Clarke
himself and an overview of 5,000 years of
African history, the film offers a
provocative look at the past through the
eyes of a leading proponent of an Afrocentric view of history. From ancient
Egypt and Africa’s other great empires,
Clarke moves through Mediterranean
borrowings, the Atlantic slave trade,
European colonization, the development of
the Pan-African movement, and present-day
African-American history. |
 |
* *
* * *
posted 2 November 2007 |
