The Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches

Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)

295 Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) Black Power Stokely Carmichael was among the most versatile speakers of the American civil rights movement. In his autobiography, he notes that he developed different styles of speaking “depending on audience and situation . . . standardEnglish speech reserved for the merely affluent and curious . . . more analytic , and ideological arguments for more serious political and intellectual forums, and . . . a down-home nitty-gritty idiom in a style I mostly borrowed from the Harlem street-corner nationalists and southern black preachers” reserved for “brothers and sisters on the block.”1 He organized uneducated and disenfranchised African Americans in Mississippi and published articles in the New York Review of Books and Massachusetts Review.2 Still in the gristle during the height of the civil rights movement, Carmichael was only twenty-five when he delivered his address “Black Power” in Berkeley on October 29, 1966. Carmichael, just elected head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had first used the term “Black Power” in a speech to six hundred people that June in Greenwood, Mississippi. He had drawn applause, voluble “amens,” and foot stomping when he reflected on his twenty-seventh arrest that day: “I ain’t going to jail no more . . . We been saying ‘Freedom’ for six years and we ain’t got nothin.’ What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” The term percolated to the surface of the speech but had been brewing for several days in response to the slogan of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC), “Freedom Now.” “That don’t scare White folks,” Carmichael later told journalist and fellow activist , Charlie Cobb, “The only thing that’s gonna get us freedom is power.”3 Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) 296 Carmichael had gone to Mississippi in 1964 as the SNCC project director for the Mississippi Delta. He had spent summers there throughout his college years at Howard University in Washington, DC, beginning in 1961. His goal was to register voters, but also to create a sense of confidence among African Americans, who made up two-thirds of the region’s population .4 Carmichael’s activities in Mississippi as well as the speeches he gave across the country were closely followed by the national press. The “Black Power” comment that had ignited his audience in June quickly drew fire from both Martin Luther King and the head of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins. “Black supremacy,” King warned, “would be equally as evil as white supremacy .”5 The Saturday Evening Post thought Carmichael’s militant pronouncement in Greenwood important enough to declare ruefully: “We are all Mississippians.”6 The idea of Black Power had not originated with Carmichael, nor was he its sole proponent, but Carmichael’s speeches amplified the message so that no corner of American society failed to hear it.7 Black Power was the counterpoise to nonviolent activism preached by Martin Luther King Jr., the SCLC, the NAACP, the Urban League, and other mainstream civil rights organizations.8 It divided the civil rights movement, worrying King that it would precipitate tensions in urban areas with heavy concentration of African Americans.9 Carmichael was born on June 29, 1941, to Trinidadian parents in Port of Spain. His parents, neither of whom were high school graduates, immigrated to the United States a few years later, and Carmichael and other family members joined them in 1952. In New York City, Stokely’s father, who dreamed of a better life for his family in America, worked as a carpenter by day and a taxi driver at night. He died in his forties, the victim, Stokely believed, of overwork. An honorable, hardworking, religious man, Stokely’s father believed in education and had an ample collection of books.10 Although in words Stokely rejected his father’s embrace of “work and overcome,” in actions he clearly profited from the model of hard work his father provided. He competed for a coveted seat in the Bronx High School of Science, where he distinguished himself. While in New York City, Carmichael kept the company of white leftists, became active in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and participated in sit-ins in the South. Perhaps most importantly, he volunteered in the office of Bayard Rustin, an African American proponent of socialism, whom Carmichael did not meet until entering Howard University, but in whose footsteps he said he wanted to follow.11 At Howard, Black Power 297 which Cobb describes as...