Black Power, 1967 From Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. 44, 46-47, 50-55. The adoption of the concept of Black Power is one of the most legitimate and healthy developments in American politics and race relations in our time. The concept of Black Power . . . . is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject the racist institutions and values of this society. The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks. By this we mean that group solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a pluralistic society. . . . The point is obvious: black people must lead and run their own organizations. Only black people can convey the revolutionary idea--and it is a revolutionary idea--that black people are able to do things themselves. Only they can help create in the community an aroused and continuing black consciousness that will provide the basis for political strength. . . . Black Power recognizes--it must recognize--the ethnic basis of American politics as well as the power-oriented nature of American politics. Black Power therefore calls for black people to consolidate behind their own, so that they can bargain from a position of strength. . . . The ultimate values and goals are not domination or exploitation of other groups, but rather an effective share in the total power of the society. Nevertheless, some observers have labeled those who advocate Black Power as racists; they have said that the call for self-identification and self-determination is racism in reverse or black supremacy. This is a deliberate and absurd lie. There is no analogy--by any stretch of definition or imagination--between the advocates of Black Power and white racists. Racism is not merely exclusion on the basis of race but exclusion for the purpose of subjugation. The goal of the racists is to keep black people on the bottom , arbitrarily and dictatorially, as they have done in this country for over three hundred years. The goal of black self-determination and black self-identity--Black power--is full participation in the decision-making processes affecting the lives of black people, and recognition of the virtues in themselves as black people. The black people of this country have not lynched whites, bombed their churches, murdered their children and manipulated laws and institutions to maintain oppression. White racists have. . . . The goal of Black Power is positive and functional to a free and viable society. No white racist can make this claim. . . . The advocates of Black Power reject the old slogans and meaningless rhetoric of previous years in the civil rights struggle. The language of yesterday is indeed irrelevant: progress, non-violence, integration, fear of white backlash, coalition. . . . One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to this point there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghettos and the black-belt South. There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of middle-class whites. It served as a sort of buffer zone between that audience and angry young blacks. It claimed to speak for the needs of a community, but it did not speak in the tone of that community. None of its so-called leaders could go into a rioting community and be listened to. In a sense, the blame must be shared--along with the mass media--by those leaders for what happened in Watts, Harlem, Chicago, Cleveland, and other places. Each time the black people in those cities saw Dr. Martin Luther King get slapped they became angry. When they saw little black girls bombed to death in a church and civil rights workers ambushed and murdered, they were angrier; and when nothing happened, they were steaming mad. We had nothing to offer that they could see, except to go out and be beaten again. We helped to build their frustration. We had only the old language of love and suffering. And in most places--that is, from the liberals and middle class--we got back the old language of patience and progress. The civil rights leaders were saying to the country: Look, you guys are supposed to be nice guys, and we are only going to do what we are supposed to do. Why do you beat us up? Why dont you give us what we ask? Why dont you straighten yourselves out? For the masses of black people, this language resulted in virtually nothing. In fact, their objective day-to-day condition worsened. . . . Such language, along with admonitions to remain nonviolent and fear the white backlash, convinced some that that course was the only course to follow. It misled some into believing that a black minority could bow its head and get whipped into a meaningful position of power. The very notion is absurd. The white society devised the language, adopted the rules and had the black community narcotized into believing that that language and those rules were, in fact, relevant. The black community was told time and again how other immigrants finally won acceptance: that is, by following the Protestant Ethic of Work and Achievement. . . . We were not told that the American dream wasnt designed for black people. That while today, to whites, the dream may seem to include black people, it cannot do so by the very nature of this nations political and economic system, which imposes institutional racism on the black masses if not upon every individual black. . . . A key phrase in our buffer-zone days was non-violence. For years it has been thought that black people would not literally fight for their lives. Why this has been so is not entirely clear; neither the larger society nor black people are noted for passivity. The notion apparently stems from the years of marches and demonstrations and sit-ins where black people did not strike back and the violence always came from white mobs. There are many who still sincerely believe in that approach. From our viewpoint, rampaging white mobs and white night-riders must be made to understand that their days of free head-whipping are over. Black people should and must fight back. Nothing more quickly repels someone bent on destroying you than the unequivocal message: OK, fool, make your move, and run the same risk I run--of dying. . . . Those of us who advocate Black power are quite clear in our own minds that a non-violent approach to civil rights is an approach black people cannot afford and a luxury white people do not deserve. It is crystal clear to us--and it must become so with the white society--that there can be no social order without social justice. White people must be made to understand that they must stop messing with black people, or the blacks will fight back! Next, we must deal with the term integration. According to its advocates, social justice will be accomplished by integrating the Negro into the mainstream institutions of the society from which he has been traditionally excluded. This concept is based on the assumption that there is nothing of value in the black community and that little of value could be created among black people. The thing to do is siphon off the acceptable black people into the surrounding middle-class white community. . . . Integration as a goal today speaks to the problem of blackness not only in an unrealistic way but also in a despicable way. It is based on complete acceptance of the fact that in order to have a decent house or education, black people must move into a white neighborhood or send their children to a white school. This reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that white is automatically superior and black is by definition inferior. For this reason, integration is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy. It allows the nation to focus on a handful of Southern black children who get into white schools at a great price, and to ignore the ninety-four percent who are left in unimproved all-black schools. . . . To sprinkle black children among white pupils in outlying schools is at best a stop-gap measure. The goal is not to take black children out of the black community and expose them to white middle-class values; the goal is to build and strengthen the black community. . . . The racial and cultural personality of the black community must be preserved and that community must win its freedom while preserving its cultural integrity. Integrity includes a pride--in the sense of self-acceptance, not chauvinism--in being black, in the historical attainments and contributions of black people. No person can be healthy, complete and mature if he must deny a part of himself; this is what integration has required thus far. This is the essential difference between integration as it is currently practiced and the concept of Black Power.
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 03:40:36 +0000
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