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Carmichael Attacks White Radicals For Causing Repression of Blacks

By James M. Fallows

America's white radicals are leading the country into fascism, black revolutionary Stokely Carmichael told a gasping crowd at Wellesley yesterday.

Lacking any coherent ideology, the white Left flits from issue to issue and erupts in "infantile disorders," Carmichael said.

But when the government responds to the disruption with repression, he concluded. "It's the black man who pays the price."

Carmichael, the former Southern civil rights leader who has spent the last two years in Africa, spoke to a crowd of nearly 1000 in Wellesley College's Alumnae Hall. The 200 blacks in the audience sat in a blacks-only section at the front of the hall, keeping the white crowd away from the stage.

Theories of Revolution

Before castigating the white radicals, Carmichael used most of his speech to develop theories of world-wide black revolution.

Alluding frequently to Marxist doctrine, Carmichaol said that the first step for the world's African people was to control a portion of lund-"Mother Africa." From there, he said, "we expand... to crush the monsters of imperialism" like the United States.

While saying that his international vision rests on a tight ideological basis. Carmichel charged that the white revo-lutionaries were incapable of any similar historical analysis.

As evidence of the way blacks pay the price for white radicalism, Carmichael pointed out that the white members of the Chicago Conspiracy are free on bail, white Bobby Seale and other Panthers are jailed.

"The basic function of that trial was to test the right to demonstrate-which is the most important right in a country moving toward fascism," he said. But because of the disruptions of the white Conspirators, "that issue was entirely lost in the trial,"

Carmichael reviewed a number of abortive black-white coalitions-from the Southern Populist movement of the 1890's to the attempted alliance between the Panthers and the Peace and Freedom Party-and concluded that the blacks suffered each time.

The basic problem, he said. was a conflict of class interests: while the white radicals are "an economically secure interest," the Panthers "represent the lumpen proletariat-the economically insecure. You can't have an alliance with a group with different class interests."

In a question period at the end of his speech, Carmichael provoked repeated angry responses from the white crowd with his comments on Israel. Women's Liberation, and the ecology movement.

The most heated exchanges came between Carmichael and several lsraeli partisans in the audience, who challenged his claim that "Israel is an unjust state,"

Carmichael said that he could not support a country "that is occupying Egypt-part of Mother Africa,' " When a student said that Israelis were merely reclaiming their native land, Carmichael shot back "how do you know that? The only documentation we have for the Jews wrote the Bible,"

Carmichael's appearance ended after a white girl asked him to defend his reported 1967 statement that a woman's role in the revolution is "to remain prone," Carmichael denied making the statement, and said that men and women have roughly equal revolutionary tasks.

But after he said that women "must not lose their femininity," another wave of hisses came from the white crowd. Carmichael turned and walked off the stage.

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