Black Leader Rips 'Obscene' U.S. Politics

Civil rights leader Kuame Ture, better remembered as sixties activist Stokely Carmichael, last night told 200 listeners in Science Center B that Black students must unite to fight injustice and gain racial equality in the "politically back-ward" United States.

"The United States is the most politically backward country in the world," Ture said, calling American culture "bourgeois" and the American political scene "obscene." But he added that "humans have an instinctive love for justice" and will keep fighting for equality until they overcome "vicious capitalist pigs."

The speech, sponsored by the Black Students Association (BSA) and the Harvard-Radcliffe Undergraduate Council, followed an afternoon workshop at Leverett House, in which Ture fielded questions from a smaller audience of primarily BSA members.

Workshop participants asked for a viable alternative to a capitalistic America based on "injustice and inequality," and Ture said that revolution was the only choice.

Ture, an organizer for the socialist All-African Revolutionary People's Party, said that he "seeks recruits" to begin a Harvard chapter of his organization.

He called Harvard students who use knowledge for their own advancement "stupid" and "backward." He said that Black students should remember that they would not be at Harvard today if Black civil rights leaders of the sixties had not fought for racial equality.

By organizing Africans worldwide, he added that he wants to liberate Africans from an immoral society and restore Africa to her former greatness so that Blacks no longer have to be "the only ethnic group in America ashamed of their heritage.

Ture said that Black students in particular must unite and rally those "misdirected" students who do not see the need for continued struggle in the eighties. But Shemin V. Proctor '87, BSA secretary-general, countered that Black students are "apathetic, not misdirected."

Ture aligned his cause with Christianity and Judaism, recalling that Ethiopia was the origin of these religions."