Stokely Carmichael: “Black Power”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Carmichael begins his speech at UC Berkeley with a mocking dig at his audience, in which he describes the university and its environs as the “white intellectual ghetto of the West.” Continuing in this edgy but humorous vein, he announces that, based upon SNCC’s successes at voter registration, he would be running for president, although he notes next that he is ineligible because he was not born in the United States. He then states that he would not get caught up in questions about the meaning of “Black Power”—leaving that to the press—though he mocks reporters, calling them “advertisers.”

Condemnation

Carmichael then turns to his first major point, the question of “whether or not a man can condemn himself.” In breaking down this question, he turns to the thought of three intellectuals. Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were both French intellectuals and writers of the early- to mid-twentieth century. Camus, born in Algeria to parents of French and Spanish origin, was the first African-born writer to win the Nobel Prize. Although his name was often linked with existentialism, Camus rejected this label and thought of himself as an absurdist. He was also associated with the European Union movement and opposition to totalitarianism. Jean-Paul Sartre was a French existentialist and Communist who opposed French rule in Algeria. Frantz Fanon was a writer, philosopher, and revolutionary who was born in Martinique and whose books— The Wretched of the Earth, Black Skin, White Masks, and A Dying Colonialism—were key documents in the anticolonial movement and would likely have been familiar to many in Carmichael’s UC Berkeley audience. Carmichael asserts that SNCC’s leaders also believed that man cannot condemn himself. Carmichael’s point is that since “white America cannot condemn herself,” SNCC has condemned it. He then mentions Sheriff Lawrence Rainey in Neshoba County, Mississippi; this is a reference to the notorious murder in 1964 of three civil rights workers, two of them white and one black, through the collusion of local law enforcement agencies and the Ku Klux Klan.

White Supremacy

With paragraph 6, Carmichael takes up the issue of white supremacy. He begins by arguing that integration is an “insidious subterfuge” that in fact maintains white supremacy. He compares integration to thalidomide, a drug given to pregnant women that infamously had turned out to cause severe birth defects. He makes reference to Ross Barnett, who had been the segregationist governor of Mississippi, and Jim Clark, the sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama, who had been responsible for authorizing the violent assaults and arrests of activists during the Selma-to-Montgomery march of 1965. He argues that American institutions are racist (Carmichael has been credited with having coined the term institutional racism) and then asks rhetorically what whites who are not racists can do to change the system.

Carmichael rejects the idea that whites can give anybody their freedom. “A man is born free” and then enslaved, so whites must stop denying freedom, rather than trying to “give” freedom. He then states that it follows logically that civil rights legislation, passed by white people, is ultimately for the benefit of white people. Laws regarding public accommodations and the right to vote, he argues, show white people that African Americans have certain rights; however, African Americans should already be aware that they are entitled to those rights. Voting, for example, is a right, not a privilege.

Carmichael next discusses white failures at democracy in the international sphere, citing Vietnam, South Africa, the Philippines, South America, and Puerto Rico. He states, in paragraph 11:

We not only condemn the [United States] for what it’s done internally, but we must condemn it for what it does externally. We see this country trying to rule the world, and someone must stand up and start articulating that this country is not God, and cannot rule the world.

In this vein he condemns missionary work in Africa as a component of white supremacy, arguing that missionary work was premised on the belief that Africans were uncivilized. He also portrays missionaries as exchanging Bibles for natives’ land. Carmichael then links domestic endeavors such as Head Start to the same agenda. He rejects the notion that people are poor simply because they do not work. If this were actually the criterion for poverty, then such people as Nelson Rockefeller (the governor of New York and heir to the Standard Oil fortune), Bobby Kennedy (the brother of president John F. Kennedy), President Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and other powerful Americans should be poor, for in Carmichael’s view, they do not work.

Black Power

Carmichael then argues, in paragraph 16, that the debate over the use of the term Black Power is part of a psychological struggle over whether African Americans can use terms without white approval. He states that black Americans are often put in the position of having to defend their actions and maintains that it is time for white America to be put in the position of having to defend its actions—“defending themselves as to why they have oppressed and exploited us.” He draws attention to the extent of segregation by noting that only 6 percent of black children are enrolled in integrated schools. Although the particular source that gave him this statistic is uncertain, a number of contemporary documents cited such a figure, including the decision in United States v. Jefferson County Board of Education (1966) by Justice John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a judge who wrote a number of influential opinions on school desegregation. In paragraph 21, Carmichael draws his listeners’ attention to the heavy-handed police presence in Oakland, California, and then asks what the nation’s political parties can do to create institutions that “will become the political expressions of people on a day-to-day basis.”

White Activism

Carmichael then discusses true integration as being a two-way street. He argues that white activists must organize in the white community to change white society. He rejects the idea of whites working in the African American community as damaging on a psychological basis and concludes that his position on this is not “reverse racist.” In this light, he alludes to the gubernatorial race in California; the election was held just over one week after his speech. The “two clowns” to whom he refers are the Democratic candidate and then-incumbent governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown and the Republican candidate and future president Ronald Reagan, who would soon win by a margin of 15 percentage points. Interestingly, Carmichael asserts that SNCC did not believe that the Democratic Party represents the needs of black people. He argues that what was needed was a new coalition of voters who would start building new political and social institutions that would meet the needs of all people. After a reference to the nineteenth-century African American leader Frederick Douglass, Carmichael calls for a new generation of leaders in the black community, declaring, in paragraph 26, that “black people must be seen in positions of power, doing and articulating for themselves.”

The Vietnam War

Carmichael then turns to an attack on the Vietnam War as an “illegal and immoral war” and rhetorically asks the audience how it could be stopped. His answer is resistance to the draft. He refers to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as a “racist” and calls President Johnson a “buffoon” and describes American troops as “hired killers.” The peace movement, he argues, has been ineffective because it consists of college students who are exempt from the draft anyway. A draft board classification of II-S (“2S” in the speech) gives deferred military service for students actively engaged in study. He calls attention to the irony of referring to black militancy as violent when black militant groups were fighting for human rights and the end of violence in places like Vietnam. As for African American soldiers who had been drafted and were fighting in Vietnam, he characterizes them as black mercenaries.

Student Activism and Politics

Carmichael next challenges students on university campuses. He notes, in paragraph 34, that it is impossible for whites and blacks to form “human relationships” given the nature of the country’s institutions. He refers to the “myths” about the United States, calling them “downright lies.” He suggests that a form of social hypocrisy has become manifest in the economic insecurity of many African Americans and the unwillingness of most affluent whites to share their relative economic security with the black community. He calls on his listeners to examine “the histories that we have been told” and observes that in countries around the world students have led revolutions. He goes on to characterize American college students—essentially his audience—as “perhaps the most politically unsophisticated students in the world” and says that they, unlike many students throughout the rest of the world, have been unable or unwilling to become revolutionaries. Once again he lambastes the Democratic political establishment, including such people as Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, Wayne Morse (a U.S. senator from Oregon who, ironically, was one of only two U.S. senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution), James Eastland (a conservative U.S. senator from Mississippi), and George Wallace (the segregationist governor of Alabama). Carmichael states that it would be impossible to reach a common moral ground with these political figures, all of them at the time Democrats. Only the seizure of power by revolution would put these and other members of the political establishment out of business.

SNCC

Carmichael then turns specifically to a discussion of SNCC. He states, in paragraph 42, that he does not want a “part of the American pie” and notes that a central purpose of SNCC was to raise questions. One of these questions was how the United States had come to be a world power and the world’s wealthiest nation. He thus segues into a discussion of nonviolence at a time when he was coming to reject his initial stance—and that of SNCC—in favor of advocating violent social change. Groups like SNCC and the Quakers are not the ones who need to espouse nonviolence, he argues; rather, white supremacists in small Mississippi towns such as Cicero and Grenada need to be persuaded to act without violence toward peaceful demonstrators.

Once again Carmichael returns to the relationship between the American civil rights struggle and the international movement against postcolonialism, that is, Western domination of a postcolonial world largely inhabited by people of color. Again, he condemns the Peace Corps, as did Malcolm X, as a method of stealing nations’ natural resources while teaching their citizens to read and write. He makes glancing references to hot spots in the world other than Vietnam. Among them are Santo Domingo (the capital of the Dominican Republic), South Africa (still in the grip of apartheid, or systematic segregation), and Zimbabwe (a former British colony then known as Rhodesia, which had recently declared its independence but was under white minority rule). He notes that the United States had tolerated oppression in these and other places as a way of opposing Communist expansion and aggression. He again alludes to the theft of smaller countries’ natural resources through organizations like the Peace Corps, and again he urges (in paragraph 51) the white community “to have the courage to go into white communities and start organizing them.” He then discusses the emergence of the organizational precursor to the Black Panther Party in Lowndes County, Alabama, as well as the fear that many white people have of anything black and the association of blackness with evil. Once more he stresses the double standard of urging nonviolence while the United States was “bombing the hell out [of] Vietnam.” He sees a further irony in comments by the president and vice president (at the time, Hubert Humphrey) about looting during urban race riots, when the United States was in effect looting Vietnam. Carmichael challenges his listeners to consider whether Ho Chi Minh, the leader of Communist North Vietnam, would agree with him about America’s illegal looting of Vietnam. He concludes his speech by stating that the chief issue facing African Americans was the psychological battle to define themselves and organize themselves as they saw fit. An important question related to this issue was how white activists could build new political institutions to destroy the old racist ones.