Stokely Carmichael: “Black Power”

Audience

Stokely Carmichael’s audience consisted of students at the University of California at Berkeley. At the time, the school was a major center of student activism; a large percentage of its students were, if not strident activists, opposed to the war in Vietnam and proponents of civil rights. Indeed, UC Berkeley was the home of the radical antiwar Berkeley Barb, and on October 16, 1965, the campus had been the starting point of a massive antiwar march to Oakland, one of the earliest mass protests in the antiwar movement.

Carmichael somewhat humorously attacks his audience as “the white intellectual ghetto of the West.” The audience would have been primarily, though not exclusively, white. Carmichael plays off the left-wing leanings of his audience as well, with references to Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon, all icons of the student left. His address has survived and has come to be regarded as a key document in the civil rights movement.