"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."
No comments:
Post a Comment