[quotes] Stokely Speaks: from Black Power to Pan-Africanism - Stokely Carmichael 1965

 

"Because revolutionary theories are based on historical analysis, one must study. One must understand one's history and one must make the correct historical analysis. At the correct moment you make your historical leap and carry the struggle forward. Not only that, you cannot rap if you really don't believe what you're saying, or if you don't know the answers."

"I think Stokely's class can stand on its own. Not only that, I think it is better than anything I could say. Just two things: he spoke to where they were at, and they were at different places, and the places changed during the movement of the discussion. Secondly, he trusted them and he trusted himself... and they trusted him."

"The panacea for lack of opportunity is education, as is the panacea for prejudice. But just how available is it? If every sixteen-year-old in the nation were motivated to attend high school, he could not: there are not enough schools, not enough physical space. As for college, less than one-quarter of the population ever gets there. The financial barrier is too high; even the cheapest state college charges fees which are impossible for the poor."

"Civil rights protest has not materially benefited the masses of Negroes; it has helped those who were already just a little ahead. The main result of that protest has been an opening up of the society to Negroes who had one of the criteria for upward mobility... In a sense, the Negroes helped by protest have been those who never wanted to be Negroes."

"There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice has adapted to an audience of liberal whites. It served as a sort of buffer zone between them and angry young blacks. None of its so-called leaders could go into a rioting community and be listened to."

"We had to begin with politics because black Americans are a propertyless people in a country where property is valued above all. We had to work for power, because this country does not function by morality, love, and nonviolence, but by power."

"For racism to die, a totally different America must be born. This is what white society does not wish to face; this is why that society prefers to talk about integration. But integration speaks not at all to the problem of poverty - only to the problem of blackness. Integration today means the man who 'makes it,' leaving his black brothers behind in the ghetto."

"If they are liberals, they complain, 'What about me - don't you want my help any more?' These are people supposedly concerned about black Americans, but today they think first of themselves, of their feelings of rejection."

"One of the most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities - which is where the racism exists - and work to get rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley. They admonish blacks to be nonviolent; let them preach nonviolence in the white community."

"You can integrate communities, but you assimilate individuals. Even if such a program were possible its result would be, not to develop the black community as a functional and honorable segment of the total society, with its own cultural identity, life patterns, and institutions, but to abolish it - the final solution to the Negro problem. Marx said that the working class is the first class in history that ever wanted to abolish itself."

"The missionaries came with the Bible, and we had the land; when they left, they had the land, and we still have the Bible."

"The question is, How can white society begin to move to see black people as human beings? I am black, therefore I am. Not: I am black and I must go to college to prove myself. I am black, therefore I am."

"What is your responsibility, black students of Morgan? Do you know about Du Bois? Have you read Douglass? Do you know Richard Wright? Can you quote J. A. Rogers? Do you know Claude McKay?... Why is it that you haven't read this stuff? Is it that you don't want to read anything about being black because you, too, are ashamed of it and are running from it? So you want to run to your debutante ball. So you want to run to your Kappa fraternity ball and forget all else."

"And I think Lewis Carroll is right: those who can define are the masters. White Western society has been able to define, and that's why she has been the master. The white youth of my generation in the West today starts off with subconscious racism because he accepts the writings of the West, which have either destroyed, distorted, lied about history. He starts off with a basic assumption of superiority that he doesn't even recognize."

"Capitalism, by its very nature, cannot create structures free from exploitation."

"We are fighting a political warfare. Politics is war without violence. War is politics with violence."

"Our people are a colony within the United States, and you are colonies outside the United States. It is more than a figure of speech to say that the black communities in America are the victims of white imperialism and colonial exploitation - in practical economic and political terms it is true."

"But what happens is that the poverty program sends a couple of hundred dollars into the community and groups start fighting over that money. So, automatically you've got splits in the community. Watts is the best example that we have to date. It was the first one to get the poverty program after the rebellion and today it is the most divided black community in the country."

"Now there are two dreams I have in my life. My dreams are rooted in reality, not in imagery. I dream, number one, of having coffee with my wife in South Africa; and number two, of having mint tea in Palestine."

"Therefore we must begin to understand those three concepts. (1) We must have an undying love. We must have an undying love for our people. (2) Every Negro is a potential black man. (3) For black people the question of community is not simply a question of geographical boundaries but a question of our people and where we are."

"It is simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence. In Vietnam our violence is legalized by white America. In Washington, D.C., my violence is not legalized, because Africans living in Washington, D.C., do not have the power to legalize their violence."

"What the liberal is really saying is that he hopes to bring about justice and economic stability for everyone through reform, that somehow the society will be able to keep expanding without redistributing the wealth."

"What the liberal really wants is to bring about change which will not in any way endanger his position. The liberal says, 'It is a fact that you are poor, and ti is a fact that some people are rich; but we can make you rich without affecting those people who are rich.' I do not know how poor people are going to get economic security without affecting the rich in a given country, unless one is going to exploit other peoples. I think that if we followed the logic of the liberal to its conclusion we would find that all we can get from it is that in order for a society to become equitable we must begin to exploit other peoples."

"With an undying love for black people wherever we may be, Stokely."

"Before you decide where you want to go, before you find your ideology, you must analyze what your problems are."

"Merely because one has a gun in his hands does not make one revolutionary. What makes one revolutionary is not only having the gun, but the political ideology to go along with the gun. And that political ideology must speak the needs and aspirations of the masses of our people. Once you have that, plus the gun, then you have a revolutionary, because revolutionaries always fight on two levels: the political and the military."

"Always we must understand our history, because we will see how it moves - from Garvey to Malcolm's father, on to Malcolm, on down the line."

"America and Canada are settler colonies, but it is difficult for us to understand that because they are close to being successful settler colonies. In order to be a successful settler colony, one must commit genocide against the traditional owners of the land. This is exactly what Europeans have done. After committing genocide, they changed the name to America. When you call them Americans, you make it sound as if they belong here. You do that because you want to call yourselves black Americans and you want to feel that you belong here too. But if we analyze historical analysis, we will see that they are not Americans, they are in fact European settlers. That's what they are."

"If you're not studying, you're doing nothing but fooling yourself. If you are a revolutionary today in the black community you must know Marx, you must know Lenin, you must know Malcolm X, Mao, Che, Fidel, Sekou Toure, Ho Chi Minh, you must know DuBois, you must know Nkrumah, you must know Lumumba, you must know Huey P. Newton, you must know LeRoi Jones, Robert Williams, you must know Fannie Lou Hamer, you must know a whole lot of people, a whole lot. Their ideas and their ideologies. Aside from that you must know what is going on in the world at the same time."

[quotes] Angela Davis an Autobiography - Angela Davis 1974

 

"There was the possibility that, having read it, more people would understand why so many of us have no alternative but to offer our lives - our bodies, our knowledge, our will - to the cause of our oppressed people."

"The isolation units which had existed in the past had been dismantled years ago, in an effort to remove from view the most blatant stances of inhumanity. Needless to say, that had not succeeded; inhumanity seethed from all the cracks and crevices of that place."

"They all explained that they had been driven by necessity to apply for this kind of job. Apparently it was one of the highest-paying jobs in New York that did not require a college education. In a way, these officers were prisoners themselves, and some of them were keenly aware that they were treading ambiguous waters. Like their predecessors, the Black overseers, they were guarding their sisters in exchange for a few bits of bread. And like the overseers, they too would discover that part of the payment for their work was their own oppression."

"The other weekly meeting place was the movies - that is, if the projector was not broken. Not even the curiosity that attracted me to the church services could make me attend one of these insipid Hollywood movies. Needless to say, it was a favorite trysting place for homosexual couples."

"Once I felt settled in the main population, my thoughts naturally turned toward the possibility of collective political activity in jail. Many people are unaware of the fact that jail and prison are two entirely different institutions... Jails are primarily for pretrial confinement, holding places until prisoners are either convicted or found innocent. More than half of the jail population have never been convicted of anything, yet they languish in these cells. Because the bail system is inherently biased in the favor of the relatively well-off, jails are disproportionately inhabited by the poor, who cannot afford the fee."

"Then it occurred to me that anyone in his place would have done the same thing - it was the madness of the institution he served that was driving him to hysterically search the hem of my skirt and the seams of my blouse."

"She seemed a fitting representative of the government of California. That state held the dubious distinction of being one of the most advanced in the country when it came to quelling resistance. California could already claim more than its share of victims. I could trace the history of my political involvement there by the number of funerals I had attended."

"The more steeped in violence our environment became, the more determined my father and mother were that I, the first-born, learn that the battle of white against Black was not written into the nature of things. On the contrary, my mother always said, love had been ordained by God. White people's hatred of us was neither natural nor eternal."

"The white people in the store were at first confused when they saw two Black people sitting in the 'whites only' section, but when they heard our accents and conversations in French, they too seemed to be pleased and excited by seeing Black people from so far away they could not possibly be a threat."

"This was my first introduction to class differences among my own people. We were the not-so-poor. Until my experiences at school, I believed that everyone else lived the way we did."

"On the one hand, there was a strong tendency affirming our identity as Black people that ran through all the school activities. But on the other hand, many teachers tended to inculcate in us the official, racist explanation for our misery. And they encouraged an individualistic, competitive way out of this torment. We were told that the ultimate purpose of our education was to provide us with the skills and knowledge to lift ourselves singly and separately out of the muck and slime of poverty by 'our own bootstraps.'"

"It hurt to see us folding in on ourselves, using ourselves as whipping posts because we did not yet know how to struggle against the real cause of our misery."

"About the time I entered high school, the civil rights movement was beginning to awaken some Black Alabamians from their deep but fretful sleep."

"At fourteen, in my junior year, I felt restless and exceedingly limited. The provincialism of Birmingham bothered me, and I had not yet been swept up into the Civil Rights Movement to the extent that it could forge for me a solid raison d'etre. I could not define or articulate the dissatisfaction I felt. I simply had the sensation of things closing in on me - and I wanted to get out."

"What had seemed a personal hatred of me, an inexplicable refusal of Southern whites to confront their own emotions, and a stubborn willingness of Blacks to acquiesce, became the inevitable consequences of a ruthless system which kept itself alive and well by encouraging spite, competition and the oppression of one group by another. Profit was the word: the cold and constant motive for the behavior, the contempt and the despair I had seen."

"James Baldwin announced that he could not continue his lectures without contradicting his moral conscience and abdicating his political responsibilities."

"In this city of in its position of trying to recuperate from tourists and fleas - in this group of typically American students which without my presence would have been lily-white - my old familiar feelings of disorientation were rekindled."

"When the news broke in Paris that Kennedy had been shot, everyone rushed down to the U.S> Embassy... Nevertheless, I felt out of place at the Embassy, surrounded by crowds of 'Americans in Paris' and it was difficult to identify with their weeping. I wondered how many of them had she tears - or had truly felt saddened - when they read the Herald Tribune story about the murders of Carole, Cynthia, Addie Mae and Denise."

"But each day it was becoming clearer to me that my ability to accomplish anything was directly dependent on my ability to contribute something concrete to the struggle."

"As in the United States, there was a natural inclination to identify the enemy as the white man. Natural because the great majority of white people, both in the United States and England, have been carriers of the racism which, in reality, benefits only a small number of them - the capitalists... When white people are indiscriminately viewed as the enemy, it is virtually impossible to develop a political solution."

"For me revolution was never an interim 'thing-to-do' before settling down; it was no fashionable club with newly minted jargon, or new kind of social life - made thrilling by risk and confrontation, made glamorous by costume. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary's life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime."

"My overall vision of the school I directed was of a place where political understanding was forged and sharpened, where consciousness became explicit and was urged in a revolutionary direction."

"In this way he subtly criticized me for having romanticized something which was really nothing more than terribly hard work. It was then that I began to realize the true meaning of underdevelopment: it is nothing to be utopianized. Romanticizing the plight of oppressed people is dangerous and misleading."

"What he wanted to do was to point the finger at the real criminal: a society which keeps Black people imprisoned in such atrocious conditions of oppression that too often it is a question of stealing or going under."

"Jails are thoughtless places. Thoughtless in the sense that no thinking is done by the administration; no problem-solving or rational evaluation of any situation slightly different from the norm. The void created by this absence of thought is filled by rules and the fear of establishing a precedent (meaning a rule they had not yet digested)."

"One small twist of fate and I might have drowned in the muck of poverty and disease and illiteracy. That is why I never felt I had the right to look upon myself as being any different from my sisters and brothers who did all the suffering, for all of us."

"Mrs. Hemphill's story was the universal story of the Black woman in a world that wants to see her crushed. Mrs. Hemphill had overcome. My mother had overcome. But many others had not. The system was pointed against us. That was what had come through so powerfully in Mrs. Hemphill's words. My own present predicament was, on a different level, evidence of that same politically, economically, socially hostile world which almost every Black women must contend with every day of her life."

"The more the movement for my freedom increased in numbers, strength, and confidence, the more imperative it became for everyone to see if not as something exceptional but as a small part of a great fight against injustice, one bough in a solidly rooted tree of resistance. It was not only political repression, but racism, poverty, police brutality, drugs, and all the myriad ways Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and white working people are kept chained to misery and despair. And it was not only within the United States of America, but in countries like Vietnam, with the bombs falling like rain from U.S. B52's, burning and dismembering innocent children."

"I sank deep into the moment, husbanding this delight, hoarding it. For I knew it would be short-lived. Work, Struggle. Confrontation lay before us like a rock-strewn road. We would walk it... But first the grass, the sun... and the people."