In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

180 “Culture and Black Power” first appeared under the title “Power! Black Power!” in the January 1967 issue of Liberator and was included in James Boggs’s book Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook. Culture and Black Power Recently I attended a conference on black culture. As I sat there looking at all the beautiful black faces, I could see in them the drive, the desire, the compassion, and the hope that in that meeting and out of that meeting they could find the unity to take them down Freedom Road. And yet inside myself I could feel only a seething. A seething because there were so many things that I wanted to say, things I wanted to tell my people, things that I thought they should know and would understand if only I could put them in a form that would show them where they had come from and where they were going. I wanted to stand up before them and say, “Look at me, look at my face. Am I not black just like you? Look at the lines in my face. Could I not have been Emmett Till’s uncle standing in that doorway in Mississippi when the two white men came? Can’t you just hear me saying, ‘Don’t take the boy, boss; please don’t take the boy. He’s just a little old boy from Chicago. He don’t know no better. Boss, don’t take the boy; don’t hurt the boy.’ Yes, I could have been Emmett Till’s uncle. And the little girls in Birmingham. Couldn’t I have been a cousin or a brother to one of them? Can’t you just see me standing there sobbing over their little bodies that have been bombed into oblivion? Or couldn’t I have been a relative of that African rebel who, long, long years ago, dived into the sea rather than allow himself to be brought in chains to this continent? Could I not have been any one of these? Look at my face. What do you see in it? But that wasn’t all that I wanted to say. I wanted to say to them, “You speak of all the miracles and the grandeur and the splendor of our ancestors in the yesteryears of Africa. But don’t you know that we are living today in an age of new miracles? Two years from now a man will be walking on the moon, and what only a few years ago was to most people mainly a beautiful symbol of love and of the unknown will be a walking place for men. And the first men to land on the moon and set up a colony there will be initiating a phenomenon that will dominate world history for the next five hundred years—that is, if by that time we have not all been blown out of world history by that power man has today because Marco Polo brought gunpowder back from China several hundred years ago. “All that knowledge is in me, too. Can’t you see it in my face? And all of it is in you as well. And we have to remember that today we are in a different age and that now when we think of our culture, we have to think not only of where we were at one time Ward.indb 180 12/21/10 9:28 AM Culture and Black Power 181 in history but where we are today and where we are going. For what good is all that culture if we cannot use it as a stepping stone to take us into the last quarter of the twentieth century?” And as they talked of African kings and princes and the deeds and miracles that these performed and of which they are so proud, I wanted to tell them, “Yes, all of that is us. But the miracles of today are ours as well. When Thomas Edison created a lightbulb , he created a miracle greater than those of Jesus of Nazareth because he gave us light by which to walk the streets at night. For at the time of Jesus of Nazareth, it was often impossible to walk the roads because of thugs who waylaid men along the way.” I wanted to tell them that when our mothers were giving birth to us, this light made it possible for the doctors to perform the...

Share