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1、Stokely CarmichaelBlack Powerdelivered October 1966, Berkeley, CAThank you very much. Its a privilege and an honor to be in the white intellectual ghetto of the West. We wanted to do a couple of things before we started. The first is that, based on the fact that SNCC, through the articulation of its
2、 program by its chairman, has been able to win elections in Georgia, Alabama, Maryland, and by our appearance here will win an election in California, in 1968 Im going to run for President of the United States. I just cant make it, cause I wasnt born in the United States. Thats the only thing holdin
3、g me back.We wanted to say that this is a student conference, as it should be, held on a campus, and that were not ever to be caught up in the intellectual masturbation of the question of Black Power. Thats a function of people who are advertisers that call themselves reporters. Oh, for my members a
4、nd friends of the press, my self-appointed white critics, I was reading Mr. Bernard Shaw two days ago, and I came across a very important quote which I think is most apropos for you. He says, All criticism is an autobiography. Dig yourself. Okay.The philosophers Camus and Sartre raise the question w
5、hether or not a man can condemn himself. The black existentialist philosopher who is pragmatic, Frantz Fanon, answered the question. He said that man could not. Camus and Sartre was not. We in SNCC tend to agree with Camus and Sartre, that a man cannot condemn himself.1 Were he to condemn himself, h
6、e would then have to inflict punishment upon himself. An example would be the Nazis. Any prisoner who - any of the Nazi prisoners who admitted, after he was caught and incarcerated, that he committed crimes, that he killed all the many people that he killed, he committed suicide. The only ones who w
7、ere able to stay alive were the ones who never admitted that they committed a crimes sic against people - that is, the ones who rationalized that Jews were not human beings and deserved to be killed, or that they were only following orders.On a more immediate scene, the officials and the population
8、- the white population - in Neshoba County, Mississippi - thats where Philadelphia is - could not - could not condemn Sheriff Rainey, his deputies, and the other fourteen men that killed three human beings. They could not because they elected Mr. Rainey to do precisely what he did; and that for them
9、 to condemn him will be for them to condemn themselves.In a much larger view, SNCC says that white America cannot condemn herself. And since we are liberal, we have done it: You stand condemned. Now, a number of things that arises from that answer of how do you condemn yourselves. Seems to me that t
10、he institutions that function in this country are clearly racist, and that theyre built upon racism. And the question, then, is how can black people inside of this country move? And then how can white people who say theyre not a part of those institutions begin to move? And how then do we begin to c
11、lear away the obstacles that we have in this society, that make us live like human beings? How can we begin to build institutions that will allow people to relate with each other as human beings? This country has never done that, especially around the country of white or black.Now, several people ha
12、ve been upset because weve said that integration was irrelevant when initiated by blacks, and that in fact it was a subterfuge, an insidious subterfuge, for the maintenance of white supremacy. Now we maintain that in the past six years or so, this country has been feeding us a thalidomide drug of in
13、tegration, and that some negroes have been walking down a dream street talking about sitting next to white people; and that that does not begin to solve the problem; that when we went to Mississippi we did not go to sit next to Ross Barnett2; we did not go to sit next to Jim Clark3; we went to get t
14、hem out of our way; and that people ought to understand that; that we were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy.Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom. No
15、man can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves black people after theyre born, so that the only acts that white people can do is to stop denying black people their freedom; that is, they must
16、stop denying freedom. They never give it to anyone.Now we want to take that to its logical extension, so that we could understand, then, what its relevancy would be in terms of new civil rights bills. I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people. For example, I am black. I know that. I also know that while I am black I am a human being, and therefore I have the
