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1、Stokely CarmichaelBlack Powerdelivered October 1966, Berkeley, CAThank you very much. Its a privilege and an honor to be in the white intellectual ghetto of the West. We wanted to do a couple of things before we started. The first is that, based on the fact that SNCC, through the articulation of its
2、 program by its chairman, has been able to win elections in Georgia, Alabama, Maryland, and by our appearance here will win an election in California, in 1968 Im going to run for President of the United States. I just cant make it, cause I wasnt born in the United States. Thats the only thing holdin
3、g me back.We wanted to say that this is a student conference, as it should be, held on a campus, and that were not ever to be caught up in the intellectual masturbation of the question of Black Power. Thats a function of people who are advertisers that call themselves reporters. Oh, for my members a
4、nd friends of the press, my self-appointed white critics, I was reading Mr. Bernard Shaw two days ago, and I came across a very important quote which I think is most apropos for you. He says, All criticism is an autobiography. Dig yourself. Okay.The philosophers Camus and Sartre raise the question w
5、hether or not a man can condemn himself. The black existentialist philosopher who is pragmatic, Frantz Fanon, answered the question. He said that man could not. Camus and Sartre was not. We in SNCC tend to agree with Camus and Sartre, that a man cannot condemn himself.1 Were he to condemn himself, h
6、e would then have to inflict punishment upon himself. An example would be the Nazis. Any prisoner who - any of the Nazi prisoners who admitted, after he was caught and incarcerated, that he committed crimes, that he killed all the many people that he killed, he committed suicide. The only ones who w
7、ere able to stay alive were the ones who never admitted that they committed a crimes sic against people - that is, the ones who rationalized that Jews were not human beings and deserved to be killed, or that they were only following orders.On a more immediate scene, the officials and the population
8、- the white population - in Neshoba County, Mississippi - thats where Philadelphia is - could not - could not condemn Sheriff Rainey, his deputies, and the other fourteen men that killed three human beings. They could not because they elected Mr. Rainey to do precisely what he did; and that for them
9、 to condemn him will be for them to condemn themselves.In a much larger view, SNCC says that white America cannot condemn herself. And since we are liberal, we have done it: You stand condemned. Now, a number of things that arises from that answer of how do you condemn yourselves. Seems to me that t
10、he institutions that function in this country are clearly racist, and that theyre built upon racism. And the question, then, is how can black people inside of this country move? And then how can white people who say theyre not a part of those institutions begin to move? And how then do we begin to c
11、lear away the obstacles that we have in this society, that make us live like human beings? How can we begin to build institutions that will allow people to relate with each other as human beings? This country has never done that, especially around the country of white or black.Now, several people ha
12、ve been upset because weve said that integration was irrelevant when initiated by blacks, and that in fact it was a subterfuge, an insidious subterfuge, for the maintenance of white supremacy. Now we maintain that in the past six years or so, this country has been feeding us a thalidomide drug of in
13、tegration, and that some negroes have been walking down a dream street talking about sitting next to white people; and that that does not begin to solve the problem; that when we went to Mississippi we did not go to sit next to Ross Barnett2; we did not go to sit next to Jim Clark3; we went to get t
14、hem out of our way; and that people ought to understand that; that we were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy.Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom. No
15、man can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves black people after theyre born, so that the only acts that white people can do is to stop denying black people their freedom; that is, they must
16、stop denying freedom. They never give it to anyone.Now we want to take that to its logical extension, so that we could understand, then, what its relevancy would be in terms of new civil rights bills. I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black
17、people. For example, I am black. I know that. I also know that while I am black I am a human being, and therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people didnt know that. Every time I tried to go into a place they stopped me. So some boys had to write a bill to tell that white man
18、, Hes a human being; dont stop him. That bill was for that white man, not for me. I knew it all the time. I knew it all the time.I knew that I could vote and that that wasnt a privilege; it was my right. Every time I tried I was shot, killed or jailed, beaten or economically deprived. So somebody ha
19、d to write a bill for white people to tell them, When a black man comes to vote, dont bother him. That bill, again, was for white people, not for black people; so that when you talk about open occupancy, I know I can live anyplace I want to live. It is white people across this country who are incapa
20、ble of allowing me to live where I want to live. You need a civil rights bill, not me. I know I can live where I want to live.So that the failures to pass a civil rights bill isnt because of Black Power, isnt because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; its not because of the rebellions
21、 that are occurring in the major cities. It is incapability of whites to deal with their own problems inside their own communities. That is the problem of the failure of the civil rights bill.And so in a larger sense we must then ask, How is it that black people move? And what do we do? But the ques
22、tion in a greater sense is, How can white people who are the majority - and who are responsible for making democracy work - make it work? They have miserably failed to this point. They have never made democracy work, be it inside the United States, Vietnam, South Africa, Philippines, South America,
23、Puerto Rico. Wherever American has been, she has not been able to make democracy work; so that in a larger sense, we not only condemn the country for what its 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
24、and start articulating that this country is not God, and cannot rule the world.Now, then, before we move on we ought to develop the white supremacy attitudes that were either conscious or subconscious thought and how they run rampant through the society today. For example, the missionaries were sent
25、 to Africa. They went with the attitude that blacks were automatically inferior. As a matter of fact, the first act the missionaries did, you know, when they got to Africa was to make us cover up our bodies, because they said it got them excited. We couldnt go bare-breasted any more because they got
26、 excited.Now when the missionaries came to civilize us because we were uncivilized, educate us because we were uneducated, and give us some - some literate studies because we were illiterate, they charged a price. The missionaries came with the Bible, and we had the land. When they left, they had th
27、e land, and we still have the Bible. And that has been the rationalization for Western civilization as it moves across the world and stealing and plundering and raping everybody in its path. Their one rationalization is that the rest of the world is uncivilized and they are in fact civilized. And th
28、ey are un-civil-ized.And that runs on today, you see, because what we have today is we have what we call modern-day Peace Corps missionaries, and they come into our ghettos and they Head Start, Upward Lift, Bootstrap, and Upward Bound us into white society, cause they dont want to face the real prob
29、lem which is a man is poor for one reason and one reason only: cause he does not have money - period. If you want to get rid of poverty, you give people money - period.And you ought not to tell me about people who dont work, and you cant give people money without working, cause if that were true, yo
30、ud have to start stopping Rockefeller, Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, the whole of Standard Oil, the Gulf Corp, all of them, including probably a large number of the Board of Trustees of this university. So the question, then, clearly, is not whether or not one can work; it
31、s Who has power? Who has power to make his or her acts legitimate? That is all. And that this country, that power is invested in the hands of white people, and they make their acts legitimate. It is now, therefore, for black people to make our acts legitimate.Now we are now engaged in a psychologica
32、l struggle in this country, and that is whether or not black people will have the right to use the words they want to use without white people giving their sanction to it; and that we maintain, whether they like it or not, we gonna use the word Black Power - and let them address themselves to that;
33、but that we are not going to wait for white people to sanction Black Power. Were tired waiting; every time black people move in this country, theyre forced to defend their position before they move. Its time that the people who are supposed to be defending their position do that. Thats white people.
34、 They ought to start defending themselves as to why they have oppressed and exploited us.Now it is clear that when this country started to move in terms of slavery, the reason for a man being picked as a slave was one reason - because of the color of his skin. If one was black one was automatically
35、inferior, inhuman, and therefore fit for slavery; so that the question of whether or not we are individually suppressed is nonsensical, and its a downright lie. We are oppressed as a group because we are black, not because we are lazy, not because were apathetic, not because were stupid, not because
36、 we smell, not because we eat watermelon and have good rhythm. We are oppressed because we are black.And in order to get out of that oppression one must wield the group power that one has, not the individual power which this country then sets the criteria under which a man may come into it. That is
37、what is called in this country as integration: You do what I tell you to do and then well let you sit at the table with us. And that we are saying that we have to be opposed to that. We must now set up criteria and that if theres going to be any integration, its going to be a two-way thing. If you b
38、elieve in integration, you can come live in Watts. You can send your children to the ghetto schools. Lets talk about that. If you believe in integration, then were going to start adopting us some white people to live in our neighborhood.So it is clear that the question is not one of integration or s
39、egregation. Integration is a mans ability to want to move in there by himself. If someone wants to live in a white neighborhood and he is black, that is his choice. It should be his rights. It is not because white people will not allow him. So vice versa: If a black man wants to live in the slums, t
40、hat should be his right. Black people will let him. That is the difference. And its a difference on which this country makes a number of logical mistakes when they begin to try to criticize the program articulated by SNCC.Now we maintain that we cannot be afford to be concerned about 6 percent of th
41、e children in this country, black children, who you allow to come into white schools. We have 94 percent who still live in shacks. We are going to be concerned about those 94 percent. You ought to be concerned about them too. The question is, Are we willing to be concerned about those 94 percent? Ar
42、e we willing to be concerned about the black people who will never get to Berkeley, who will never get to Harvard, and cannot get an education, so youll never get a chance to rub shoulders with them and say, Well, hes almost as good as we are; hes not like the others? The question is, How can white
43、society begin to move to see black people as human beings? I am black, therefore I am; not that I am black and I must go to college to prove myself. I am black, therefore I am. And dont deprive me of anything and say to me that you must go to college before you gain access to X, Y, and Z. It is only
44、 a rationalization for ones oppression.The - The political parties in this country do not meet the needs of people on a day-to-day basis. The question is, How can we build new political institutions that will become the political expressions of people on a day-to-day basis? The question is, How can
45、you build political institutions that will begin to meet the needs of Oakland, California? And the needs of Oakland, California, is not 1,000 policemen with submachine guns. They dont need that. They need that least of all. The question is, How can we build institutions where those people can begin
46、to function on a day-to-day basis, where they can get decent jobs, where they can get decent houses, and where they can begin to participate in the policy and major decisions that affect their lives? Thats what they need, not Gestapo troops, because this is not 1942, and if you play like Nazis, we p
47、laying back with you this time around. Get hip to that.The question then is, How can white people move to start making the major institutions that they have in this country function the way it is supposed to function? That is the real question. And can white people move inside their own community an
48、d start tearing down racism where in fact it does exist? Where it exists. It is you who live in Cicero and stop us from living there. It is white people who stop us from moving into Grenada. It is white people who make sure that we live in the ghettos of this country. it is white institutions that d
49、o that. They must change. In order - In order for America to really live on a basic principle of human relationships, a new society must be born. Racism must die, and the economic exploitation of this country of non-white peoples around the world must also die - must also die.Now there are several programs that we have in the South, most in poor white communities. Were trying