|
What We Want
By Stokely
Carmichael
September 22, 1966
What has been
called the Civil Rights Revolution took many forms in
the twenty-two years between the end of World War II and
1967. At first a movement to obtain such reforms as
desegregation of the armed forces, it quickly
concentrated on school desegregation, an effort that won
a legal victory with the Supreme Court decisions of 1954
and 1955. Desegregation of public accommodations,
especially in the South, was the next goal. Although
this too was largely achieved, the basic problem
remained unsolved. During the late 1950s and early 1960s
the movement was essentially nonviolent, and its leaders
were often, if not always, clergymen like Martin Luther
King. But, as the 1960s wore on, the slogan changed from
equal civil rights to black power, which expressed
African Americans' continuing frustration with the lack
of real progress toward general social and economic
equality in the country.
Stokely Carmichael,
at the time the national chairman of the
Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, wrote the following
article for the New York Review of Books in
September 1966. Entitled “What We Want,” the article
tried to sum up the feelings and desires of younger
African Americans throughout the country. Born in 1941
in Trinidad and raised in New York City, Stokely
Carmichael joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) while enrolled at
Howard University. In
the mid-1960’s, he emerged as the chairman of the
organization and shifted its emphasis from voter
registration to self-reliance and violent change. His
successor,
H. Rap Brown, was even more militant, once
asserting that “Violence is as American as cherry pie.”
Carmichael eventually changed his name to Kwame Ture and
moved the African nation of
Guinea.
* *
* * *
One of the
tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to
now there has been no national organization which 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, 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 yourselves 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, makes 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 percent
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 percent 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 this year's elections was raised from
$50 to $500 in order to prevent most Negroes from
becoming candidates.
On May 3, five new
county “freedom organizations” convened and nominated
candidates for the offices of sheriff, tax assessor,
members of the school boards. These men and women are up
for election in November--if they live until then. Their
ballot symbol is 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
Alabamians 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 last July. 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, eighty-six
white families own 90 percent 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 ghettoes
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 as fast as his new sports car will
take him. It has no relevance to the Harlem wino or to
the cottonpicker making $3 a day. As a lady I know in
Alabama once said, “The food that Ralph Bunche eats
doesn't fill my stomach.”
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 percent 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.
Last April, before
the furor over black power, Christopher Jencks wrote in
a New Republic article on white Mississippi's
manipulation of the antipoverty 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 antipoverty
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 percent of all families in
metropolitan “poverty areas” and only 6 percent 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 percent 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 natives 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 be done 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 middleclass
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
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, from top to bottom, 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. Camus and Sartre
have asked, can a man condemn himself? 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.
Source:
MNSD
* *
* * *
Stokely
Carmichael, Rights Leader Who Coined 'Black Power,' Dies at 57
By Michael T. Kaufman
November 16, 1998
Kwame Ture, the flamboyant civil rights leader
known to most Americans as Stokely Carmichael, died yesterday in
Conakry, Guinea. He was 57 and is best remembered for his use of the
phrase ''black power,'' which in the mid-1960's ignited a white backlash
and alarmed an older generation of civil rights leaders, including the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The cause was prostate cancer, for which Mr. Ture
had been treated at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York
in the last two years. He once said his cancer ''was given to me by
forces of American imperialism and others who conspired with them.''
Mr. Ture, who changed his name in
1978 to honor Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sekou Toure, two African socialist
leaders who had befriended him, spent most of the last 30 years in
Guinea, calling himself a revolutionary and advocating a Pan-African
ideology that evoked few resonances in the United States, or, for that
matter, Africa. Mr. Ture's advocacy of Pan-Africanism was the last phase
in a political evolution that passed from indifference to the civil
rights movement when he was a high school student to emergence as an
effective nonviolent volunteer risking his life against segregation to
honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party.
Though his active participation in
the struggle for civil rights lasted barely a decade, he was a
charismatic figure in a turbulent time, when real violence and rhetoric
escalated on both sides of the color line. Stokely Carmichael was
inspired to participate in the civil rights movement by the bravery of
those blacks and whites who protested segregated service with sit-ins at
lunch counters in the South.
''When I first heard about the
Negroes sitting in at lunch counters down South,'' he told Gordon Parks
in Life magazine in 1967, ''I thought they were just a bunch of
publicity hounds. But one night when I saw those young kids on TV,
getting back up on the lunch counter stools after being knocked off
them, sugar in their eyes, ketchup in their hair— well, something
happened to me. Suddenly I was burning.''
Rejecting scholarships from several
white universities, he entered Howard University in Washington in 1960.
By the end of his freshman year, he had joined the Freedom Rides of the
Congress of Racial Equality, hazardous bus trips of blacks and whites
that challenged segregated interstate travel in the South. The Freedom
Riders often met with violence, and at their destinations Mr. Carmichael
and the others were arrested and jailed, the first incarcerations he
experienced. One early arrest brought him a particularly harsh 49-day
sentence in Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi.
Graduating with a bachelor's degree
in philosophy from Howard in 1964, he joined the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee. It was ''Freedom Summer'' in the year that SNCC
(popularly pronounced snick) was sending hundreds of black and white
volunteers to the South to teach, set up clinics and register
disenfranchised black Southerners.
Tall, slim, handsome and a dynamic
speaker, Mr. Carmichael soon emerged as a leader, cocky enough to be
described as looking like he was strutting when standing still. Mr.
Parks wrote that watching him made him believe that the young man could
''stroll through Dixie in broad daylight using the Confederate flag for
a handkerchief.''
A Radicalism Born of Raw Experience
As a SNCC field organizer in
Lowndes County in Alabama, where blacks were in the majority but
politically powerless, he helped raise the number of registered black
voters to 2,600 from a mere 70, or 300 more than the number of
registered whites.
Displeased by the response of the
established parties to the success of the registration drive, he
organized the all-black Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which, to
fulfill a state requirement that all parties have a logo, took a black
panther as its symbol. The panther was later adopted by the Black
Panther Party.
The young Mr. Carmichael was
radicalized by his experiences working in the segregated South, where
peaceful protesters were beaten, brutalized and sometimes killed for
seeking the ordinary rights of citizens. He once recalled watching from
his hotel room in a little Alabama town while nonviolent black
demonstrators were beaten and shocked with cattle prods by the police.
Horrified, he said that he screamed and could not stop.
Mr. Carmichael was arrested so
often as a nonviolent volunteer that he lost count after 32. His growing
impatience with the tactics of passive resistance was gaining support,
and in 1966 he was chosen as chairman of SNCC, replacing John Lewis, a
hardworking integrationist who is now a Congressman from Georgia.
Barely a
month after his selection, Mr. Carmichael, then just 25, raised the call
for black power, thereby signaling a crossroads in the civil rights
struggle. . . .
Source:
NYTimes
* *
* * *
Black
Power, A Critique of the System
/
Black
Power
Amite
County Beginning
Kish Mir Tuchas
A
Tribute to Kwame Toure/Stokely Carmichael
* *
* * *
The NAACP Black Power and the
African American Freedom Struggle, 1966-1969—By Simon Hall—On the
evening of 17 June 1966,
Stokely
Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), addressed a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. The SNCC
leader had been released from jail minutes before and acknowledged the
“roar” of the angry crowd with a “raised arm and a clenched fist” as he
moved forward to speak.
“This is the 27th time I have been
arrested—and I ain’t going to jail no more, I ain’t going to jail no
more,” he told the several hundred mostly local African Americans. “The
only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over.
We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we
gonna start saying now is Black Power!” Carmichael proclaimed that
“every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned tomorrow to get rid
of the dirt . . . from now on when they ask what you want, you know what
to tell ’em. What do you want?” The crowd thundered back, “Black
Power!”— OnlineLibrary
* *
* * *
The
NAACP Black Power and the African American
Freedom Struggle, 1966-1969—By Simon Hall—The
NAACP’s executive
director,
Roy Wilkins, had been appointed
assistant secretary in 1931. Three years
later he replaced
W. E. B. Du
Bois as editor of
The Crisis, the association’s
magazine, before succeeding Walter White as
head of the organization in 1955. Reluctant
to commit the association to a strategy of
civil disobedience and protest, Roy Wilkins
also equivocated about the efforts of groups
like SNCC to build a civil rights movement
from the bottom up by fostering indigenous
black leadership and empowering local
African Americans.
Indeed,
Wilkins agreed with civil rights strategist
Bayard Rustin that the black movement
needed to align itself with the liberal wing
of the Democratic Party to effect a
progressive political re-alignment in order
to best advance the cause of civil rights.
Rustin was not noted as a friend of black
radicals even in the early 1960s, and his
reaction to Black Power was unsurprising.
On 5
July 1966 Wilkins addressed more than 1,500
delegates to the
NAACP’s 57th annual
convention at Los Angeles’ First Methodist
Church. The veteran civil rights leader
attacked Black Power in remarkably
uncompromising language. “No matter how
endlessly they try to explain it,” he said,
“the term ‘Black Power’ means anti-white
power . . . it has to mean ‘going-it-alone.’
It has to mean separatism.” For the
NAACP
leader, it was a “reverse Mississippi, a
reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan” that
could result only in “Black death.” Wilkins
explained that the
NAACP
had fought racial discrimination for too
long to ally itself with a concept that
rested on “the ranging of race against
race,” and described Black Power as “the
father of hatred and the mother of
violence.”
Wilkins
kept up his attacks in the aftermath of the
convention. On 13 July he told New York’s
Republican Senator
Jacob K. Javits that the
NAACP
stood by his “branding Black power . . . as
carrying unmistakable connotations of being
antiwhite . . .” In August, Wilkins declined
to participate in an upcoming planning
conference for a
National Conference on Black Power. On
17 October, in a mailing sent to
NAACP
supporters, Wilkins reiterated his
opposition to Black Power. Then, in an
address before his native Missouri
NAACP
state conference in November, he called on
delegates to “throw out . . . this ‘Black
Power’ business” on the grounds that it made
“thousands . . . sorrowful, apprehensive and
fearful.”
Some of
Wilkins’s hostility can be understood as a
product of his deteriorating
relationship with
SNCC and Stokely Carmichael.
Never a fan of the “young squirts” and
“smart-alecks” who formed the shock-troops
of the civil rights movement, the
NAACP
leader’s rapport with the SNCC chairman had
recently hit an all-time low. At a 7 June
meeting in Memphis to discuss strategy for
the “March
Against Fear,” Carmichael started
“acting crazy”: “cursing real bad,” the SNCC
leader showered Wilkins with expletives,
accusing the veteran civil rights leader of
“selling out the people.” Wilkins left the
meeting “in disgust” and withdrew the
national
NAACP
from the march.—OnlineLibrary * *
* * *
|
Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy
Wilkins
By
Roy Wilkins and Tom Mathews
History
will remember Roy Wilkins (1901–1981) as one
of the great leaders of the twentieth
century for his contributions to the
advancement of civil rights in America. For
nearly half a century—first as assistant
secretary, also succeeding W. E. B. Dubois
as editor of The Crisis, and finally
succeeding Walter White as executive
director—Roy Wilkins served and led the
N.A.A.C.P. in their fight for justice for
African Americans. Wilkins was a relentless
pragmatist who advocated progressive change
through legal action.
He
participated or led in the achievement of
every major civil rights advance, working
for the integration of the army, helping to
plan and organize the historic march on
Washington, and pushing every president from
Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter to
implement civil rights legislation. This is
a dramatic story of one man's struggle for
his people's rights, as well as a vivid
recollection of the events and the people
that have shaped modern black history.—Da
Capo Press |
 |
|
African American Political Thought,
Volume 1
By Marcus Pohlman /
Google Books
Along the Color Line: Explorations in the
Black Experience
Edited by August
Meier and Elliot Rudwick (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976)
Black Nationalism in America
Edited by Bracey,
Meier, and Rudwick
The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the
Civil Rights-Black Power Era
Edited by Peniel E.
Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006)
Black Power: Radical Political and African
American Identity
By Jeffrey O. G.
Ogbar (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004)
Civil War on Race Street: The Civil
Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland
By Peter Levy
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2003)
The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance
and the Civil Rights Movement
By Lance Hill
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004)
Down the Line: The Collected Writings of
Bayard Rustin
Introduction by C.
Vann Woodward (Chicago: Quadrangle Books,
1971)
Freedom’s Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle
Against Racism in America, 1909–1969
By Gilbert Jonas;
(New York: Routledge, 2005)
Gender and the Civil Rights Movement
Edited by Peter Ling
and Sharon Monteith (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1999)
A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New
Right, and the 1960s
By Rebecca E. Klatch,
(Berkeley and London: University of
California Press, 1999)
In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of
the 1960s
By Clayborne Carson
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1981)
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The
Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi
Freedom Struggle
By Charles Payne
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:
University of California Press, 1995)
A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka
(Leroi Jones) & Black Power Politics
By Komozi Woodard
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998)
Negroes With Guns
By Robert F.
Williams (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State
University Press, 1998)
The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the
Origins of the New Conservatism, and the
Transformation of American Politics
By Dan T. Carter
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2000
Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and
the Roots of Black Power
By Timothy B. Tyson
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North
Carolina Press, 1999)
Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles
of Stokely Carmichael
By Stokely
Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell
(New York: Scribner, 2003)
Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy
Wilkins
By Roy Wilkins with
Tom Matthews (New York: Da Capo Press,
1994)
Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New
American Right
By Lisa McGirr
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2001)
Sweet Land of Liberty?: The
African-American Struggle for Civil Rights
in the Twentieth Century
By Robert Cook;
(London and New York: Longman, 1998)
This Little Light of Mine: The Life of
Fannie Lou Hamer
By Kay Mills (New
York: Plume Books, 1994)
“The Ticket to Freedom”: The NAACP and the
Struggle for Black Political Integration
By Manfred Berg
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2005)
Turning Right in the Sixties: The
Conservative Capture of the GOP
By Mary C. Brennan
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1995
Whitney M. Young, Jr., and the Struggle for
Civil Rights
By Nancy J. Weiss
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1990)
Women in the Civil Rights Movement:
Trailblazers & Torchbearers, 1941–1965
Edited by Vicki L.
Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara
Woods (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1993) |
* * * * *
 |
Sammy Younge, Jr. The First Black College Student
to Die in the Black Liberation Movement
By
James Forman
Tuskegee native
Samuel Younge Jr. (1944-1966) began attending
Tuskegee Institute in Macon County in 1965 and
advocated for civil rights as a member of the
Tuskegee Institute Advancement League. Younge
campaigned for racial equality across Alabama and in
neighboring Mississippi before his shooting death in
Macon County in 1966.
Four months
later, Younge was again working a voter-registration
drive in Macon County. On January 3, 1966, after he
tried to use the whites-only bathroom at a Standard
Oil gas station, Younge was shot and killed by
attendant Marvin Segrest.
He was the first African
American student activist killed during the civil
rights movement.
In the days following his death, thousands marched
through the streets of Tuskegee in outrage over the
treatment of blacks within the city. |
His shooting death at a
Macon County service station became a rallying point for
opponents of racial inequality during the late 1960s.
Despite the demonstrations, Segrest was not indicted for
Younge's murder until November 1966 and was found innocent
by an all-white jury the following month. Younge's death
also spurred action from SNCC, which called a press
conference on January 6, 1966, to declare its opposition to
the war in Vietnam, the first statement of its kind by a
civil rights organization. Younge's death was highlighted at
the press conference as an example of the hypocrisy of
fighting for freedom abroad while rights were denied in the
United States and was used as a call for people to refuse
the draft and work for freedom at home instead.—Encyclopedia
of Alabama
* * *
* *
* *
* * *
|
The Shadows of Youth
The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation
By
Andrew B. Lewis
With deep admiration and rigorous scholarship, historian
Lewis (Gonna
Sit at the Welcome Table) revisits the ragtag band
of young men and women who formed the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee. Impatient with what they considered
the overly cautious and accommodating pace of the NAACP and
Martin Luther King Jr.,
the black college students and their white allies, inspired
by Gandhi's principles of nonviolence and moral integrity,
risked their lives to challenge a deeply entrenched system.
Fanning out over the Jim Crow South, SNCC organized sit-ins,
voter registration drives, Freedom Schools and protest
marches. Despite early successes, the movement disintegrated
in the late 1960s, succeeded by the militant Black Power
movement. The highly readable history follows the later
careers of the principal leaders. Some, like
Stokely Carmichael
and H. Rap Brown, became
bitter and disillusioned. Others, including
Marion
Barry,
Julian
Bond and
John Lewis, tempered their idealism and moved from
protest to politics, assuming positions of leadership within
the very institutions they had challenged. According to the
author, No organization contributed more to the civil rights
movement than SNCC, and with his eloquent book, he offers a
deserved tribute.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
* * * *
*
Michelle Alexander: US Prisons, The New Jim Crow
/
Judge Mathis Weighs in on the execution of Troy Davis
 |
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
By
Michelle
Alexander
The
mass incarceration of people of color through the War on
Drugs is a big part of the reason that a black child
born today is less likely to be raised by both parents
than a black child born during slavery. The absence of
black fathers from families across America is not simply
a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time
watching Sports Center. Hundreds of thousands of black
men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away
for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed
by whites. Most people seem to
imagine that the drug war—which has swept millions of
poor people of color behind bars—has been aimed at
rooting out drug kingpins or violent drug offenders.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This war has
been focused overwhelmingly on low-level drug offenses,
like marijuana possession—the very crimes that happen
with equal frequency in middle class white communities.
|
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music)
posted 4 July 2011
|
