Carmichael on "Black Power"

Stokely Carmichael carge to Boston. He spoke in the streets and he was heard. He talked of hate and was loved. Everyone touched him.

In practice the Carmichael philosophy is simplistic. Speaking before a Negro rally in Roxbury, Carmichael strips away the intellectual subtleties he peddles to white audiences and talks to Negro needs and frustrations. The abstract becomes concrete: "Black flesh and property is sacred, and if they try to take one of us to Vietnam they will have to come up here and take all of us."

But in principle the SNCC reasoning goes deeper than the rousing words used at rallies. The injustices perpetrated on the Negro by the white man over the centuries are used as a acapegoat to solidify "Black Power." Power is the only thing white America understands, Carmichael preaches, thus it is useless to attempt to improve your condition without power.

The goals of Black Power are not integration or acceptance in the white society, but rather a separate equality of living standards for the Black communities. Carmichael dispels the myth that Negroes want to go to school in the white suburbs--"we want good schools in the ghettos." Black Power does not aim at the conventional civil rights goal of integration, but rather aims to destroy white supremacy.

But Carmichael goes one step further in establishing the new goals for Black Power by saying that the Negro must deny the "system" which exploits non-whites all over the world. Carmichael calls the Negro fighting in Vietnam a "mercenary" who is fighting the racist wars of the American white. "The American whites are out to conquer the world; they think they are God, and we must show them that their play time is over," Carmichael said.

The means to achieve Black Power are revolutionary. The Negro is to use whatever tactics he is willing to take the consequences for, and this includes block voting, a general strike, or molotov cocktails. Carmichael is careful to dispel another myth--nonviolence, which he says the press attributed to SNCC. "We preach nonviolence among ourselves, but that's as far as it goes," Carmichael said. "They [the whites] don't tell you about the time we marched in Lawrence County with 900 armed men--they didn't mess with us," he added.

Carmichael encourages the Negro ghettos to form para-government institutions if it becomes necessary. "If you can't get what you want from the Boston school board, from one of your own," he said. If the white shop-keepers are charging high prices for rotten meat, kick them out of the ghettos and form cooperatives. If the police force refuses to promote one of the Negro police men to captain, then only invite the Negro police into the ghettos. If the draft tries to take the most vital element out of the ghettos to fight their racist wars, then go rip up the induction centers as we did in Georgia -- "we went in with 11 men last time and they were all arrested we're going back with 50 next time."

Carmichael is quite explicit when he addresses the Northern, white liberals: "we don't want you working in our ghettos one summer and going to Europe the next summer, but if you really are sincere about helping Negroes in America, then try to reform some of the white supremacists in your own neighborhood." Carmichael explains that white civil rights workers must be expelled from work in Negro ghettos because they perpetuate the myth that the Negroes can't do anything for themselves.

After being snubbed by Carmichael, the white liberal is disoriented--or as Stokely would say he is oriented. The white liberal pipe-dreams--integration and nonviolence--have been busted. The real world comes flooding in. The white liberals laugh when Carmichael laughs at them, they clap when he puts them down, they cheer when he slaps them in the face. Why?

Probably because they are white and are ashamed of what other whites are doing and have done to Negroes; probably because they realize that many of Carmichael's pokes are well deserved; probably because they went to Europe last summer; probably because they rejoice to see the Negroes "get together and move together" even if it is at their expense.

Few dare to criticize Carmichael because his eloquent tongue translates all white criticism into bigotry. Carmichael is right on so many issues that he would be able to admit where he is wrong. When talking to him, the temptation is to ask him if he really wants the separatist state- within-a-state that he advocates to come about.

One wonders what would happen if the Jews and the Irish, the Italians and Chinese all followed Carmichael's philosophy and set up para-governments which worked for their particular racial and ethnic interests. Isn't that exactly what the Democratic system tries to avoid with a system of cross-cutting pressure groups. Obviously the American system has failed with the Negro minority, but is an intensified ghetto the answer?

To Carmichael, and to the people who gathered to hear him speak with Louis X in Roxbury this last week, the answer has been a resounding YES. The solution has become as desperate as the problem.

Carmichael's solution is extremely popular at Negro gatherings in the ghetto, and will continue to gather momentum across the country as Negros become increasingly conscious of their "power to disrupt." But such an isolationist policy will sever communications between liberal whites and Negroes in the civil rights movement at a crucial juncture.

Isolation, we have learned before, does not resolve conflict.