Stokely Carmichael: “Black Power”

Context

The year 1966 was pivotal for both of Carmichael’s major concerns: civil rights and the Vietnam War. His address was delivered at a time when the political and social climate of the country was being shaped by the assassinations of three major figures. President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated on November 22, 1963, and the black civil rights activist Malcolm X had been killed on February 21, 1965. Eighteen months after the UC Berkeley speech, on April 4, 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., would be murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. Several months before the UC Berkeley speech, Carmichael had taken part in the March against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. The march had been organized by James Meredith, the first African American student at the University of Mississippi, where he had been subject to constant harassment. After graduation he organized the march, which began on June 5, 1966, in order to bring attention to black voting rights issues in the South and to help blacks overcome fear of violence. During the march he was shot in an assassination attempt by Aubrey James Norvell, but he survived. Several civil rights leaders, including Carmichael, joined the march after the shooting. Carmichael was arrested in Greenwood, Mississippi, while participating in the march. When he rejoined the marchers, he galvanized them with a speech at a rally; this speech has also been referred to as his “Black Power” speech.

At the time of his speech at UC Berkeley, Carmichael was still not only a member of SNCC but also in many ways its public face and certainly its most charismatic speaker. He was particularly highly regarded as a speaker on college campuses. SNCC, formed in 1960, was a major force in the civil rights movement. It organized voter registration drives throughout the South and events such as the 1963 March on Washington. Leaders of the organization included such notables of the civil rights movement as Julian Bond, John Lewis, Marion Barry, and Carmichael’s successor as chairman, H. Rap Brown (later known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin). In addition to its “Black Power” focus, SNCC was also involved in protests against the Vietnam War.

On March 9, 1965, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Selma, Alabama, to lead a nonviolent march of activists, both black and white, to the state capital at Montgomery. The march had already begun two days earlier, but its participants had encountered violent resistance from state troopers and local law enforcement at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Selma’s outskirts. On March 25, the marchers, under King’s leadership and the protection of National Guard troops authorized by President Lyndon Johnson, arrived in Montgomery. The march had attracted over twenty-five thousand participants in its final days, but its triumph would soon be overshadowed by other events. In August of that same year, riots erupted in the Watts section of Los Angeles. During the five days of disturbances, over fourteen thousand National Guard troops were sent to South Central Los Angeles. When the dust settled, thirty-four had died (most of them black), more than one thousand had been injured, and property damage had amounted to an estimated $40 million, possibly much more. During the following months up to the time of Carmichael’s UC Berkeley speech, violent conflict involving blacks and local law enforcement swept through cities across the nation. These events prompted SNCC’s leadership to begin to move away from strict adherence to the principle of nonviolence.

Also on the nation’s mind was the deepening American involvement in Vietnam. In August 1964 the Communist North Vietnamese attacked two U.S. naval destroyers. In response, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (unanimously in the House of Representatives and with just two nays in the Senate), which gave President Lyndon Johnson the authority to send combat troops to South Vietnam. In March 1965, the first U.S. combat troops—thirty-five hundred Marines—joined twenty-three thousand U.S. advisers and special forces already in Vietnam. By the end of that year nearly two hundred thousand American troops would be in Vietnam. Antiwar sentiment was strongly felt on many college campuses in the mid-1960s, but the liberal UC Berkeley campus was a hotbed of student protest. In the spring of 1965, the Vietnam Day Committee—a coalition of student groups, political groups, labor organizations, and churches—was formed on the campus by the activists Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and others. A campus protest on May 21 and 22 of that year, during which President Johnson was burned in effigy, attracted some thirty-five thousand people. In his speech at UC Berkeley in 1966, Carmichael would have been speaking before a highly receptive audience.