It’s a great pleasure for me to be back in the United States generally and in Atlanta in particular. It’s good to see such familiar faces, especially that of my lawyer, Mr. Howard Moore, who has always stood close to me since the very first time I met him, back in 1961, I believe. A then young up-and-coming bourgeois lawyer, who gave up financial success and became a true—and I think Chico [Neblett] terms him correctly—black defender of the movement because he always defends all of us anytime we call. And it is certainly good to have a man of the stature of Howard Moore inside our community who is always willing to come to our aid.
Delivered at Morehouse College Gymnasium, Atlanta, Georgia, April, 1970. Sponsored by the Institute of the Black World, with excerpts from speech at Federal City College added to the body. Washington, D.C., March, 1970.
Many people said that when I left the United States fourteen months ago, I was running—that I was afraid. I want to deal with some of these attacks that have been thrown my way during the past months. I don’t want to attack any personalities because I have never done that, and I learned that from Dr. Martin Luther King. I’ve never attacked any black man even though I’ve been attacked by almost all of them—the ones on the right and the ones who are supposed to be revolutionary. Dr. King never attacked any black man and that’s why I had a great deal of respect and admiration for him—because he cared about his people and he always sought to unify us rather than to divide us. But I must speak to some of the criticisms because I think it’s necessary for us to clear up our minds. A lot of the criticisms have not been on a political level, but on a personal level; that means my critics are incapable of dealing with my political ideology and must therefore attack me personally. That shows the very weakness of their political position. Stokely Carmichael isn’t Stokely Carmichael because he’s Stokely Carmichael. He’s Stokely Carmichael because of the political ideology he expresses and that’s why people listen to him and pay any attention to him. So if you are attacking Stokely Carmichael, you must attack the political ideology that he expresses, not Stokely Carmichael the person. When you begin to attack the person, you admit you are incapable of attacking his political ideology.
What have been the attacks? The people who said I was afraid, unfortunately, were people who just became revolutionary last week or last year. Many of those now calling me afraid overlook the fact that when I was in Mississippi, as a young man of nineteen, facing guns and bullets, some of them were raping black women and writing love letters to white girls—very revolutionary acts, no doubt.
When Willie Ricks [former SNCC organizer and field secretary] and I were calling for Black Power in Mississippi in 1966, they didn’t even know they were black.
In this very city, Atlanta, Georgia (where I understand I have also come under some heavy attacks because I am supposed to be afraid), I was the first black man to be arrested by Mayor Ivan Allen for inciting to riot. My defender then was again my attorney, Mr. Moore. At that time, most people were afraid of the concept Black Power. Obviously, these people who say I’m afraid do not understand revolution. They think revolution is about yelling and screaming. They actually believe that they can get up on T.V. and rap their way out of the trouble we find ourselves in. They do not recognize that if one is truly a revolutionary, one must understand that one must take time out to study.
Because revolutionary theories are based on historical analyses, one must study. One must understand one’s history and one must make the correct historical analysis. At the correct moment you make your historical leap and carry the struggle forward. Not only that, you cannot rap if you really don’t believe what you’re saying, or if you don’t know the answers. Fourteen months ago it became clear to me that the black community was heading for political chaos. I knew that I didn’t have the answers, so it was silly for me to stay here and keep rapping about what I didn’t know. Why should I stay here to get up on television and yell a lot of nonsense? It would only cause confusion in my community. I don’t want to do that. Confusion is the greatest enemy of revolution.
If you’re talking twenty-four hours a day to rallies, to television, to the press, you don’t have time to read the newspapers, let alone read your history. You can’t be revolutionary off the top of your head. How can you do that, you’re jiving with your people. Jiving with them. I thought the best thing I could do if I really cared about the interests of my people was to go somewhere to study and try and understand more clearly the forces of history. Therefore, at the invitation of the president of Guinea, Mr. Ahmed Sékou Touré, I went to study under the man I consider the most brilliant in the world today—Osagyefo, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
Many people have also attacked me for my funds. They said, “Carmichael doesn’t work, how come he’s running here and running there?” If anybody knows anything about lectures series, they will know that the people who invite you always supply the funds for your transport. So whenever I’m invited to speak, the host supplies the funds for that transportation.
I also fell under attack by organizations that I’d helped to build. For example: I worked with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee since its very inception. I helped build that organization, I gave it my skills. That organization fired me. I was expelled from the organization because I was supposed to have had a $70,000 house. No one took the time out to check whether or not their brother who had worked with them had the $70,000 house. They just accepted the word of the white man, and they were supposed to be political. So they expelled me for having a $70,000 house. I am still waiting for my house. But I didn’t waste time answering these accusations because they were not engaged in a personal battle with Stokely Carmichael but a political one. I represented a political ideology, whether I had a $7,000 house, a $70,000 house or a $270,000 house. That was not the issue. The issue was the political ideology of Stokely Carmichael. I want to keep stressing this because in the years ahead of us there will be more attacks on the personalities, and we must not be bogged down with those attacks. We must always ask what is the attack on his political ideology. SNCC attacked me, but I never attacked them. I will never attack any black man. That is causing divisions inside our community, and if they cared about our community, they would try to bring about unity instead of division. At this period of our struggle, unity is paramount.
In 1965 I organized the first Black Panther Party in this country in Lowndes County, Alabama. It was a party organized around a political platform of black independent politics with guns. When I went to California in 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale came to me and asked me if they could organize a Black Panther Party in the Bay area. I agreed to that. I left the country and went traveling around. When I came back to the country Huey P. Newton had been shot and jailed. I had heard about it when I was in Tanzania. We had a rally in Tanzania for Huey, because I had always been impressed with the Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party and always had a great deal of respect for him. When he was in jail, Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale came to me and asked me would I help them get some publicity for Huey because they said to me that no other black man in the country would help. I said, of course—there ain’t no doubt about it. I explained to them that we had different political ideologies and were going in different directions but because of my love for Huey P. Newton I would work with them. We got out of the bind by saying that I would become Honorary Prime Minister, which means I would speak for the Party, but I would have nothing to do with the functioning of the Party. I accepted this. I was concerned about Huey P. Newton. I felt that we needed all of the noble warriors that we could have out here educating the masses of our people rather than sitting in jail. The Panthers and I, of course, began to go in different ways in our political philosophy. I came back to Washington, D.C., and I organized the Black United Front. The Panthers went in a different direction. The contradictions began to mount more and more and, finally, I felt we had to part forces. I merely wrote a letter resigning from the Black Panther Party. I never attacked them. Yet before and after my resignation they attacked me every time they got a chance. That is their wish. They may do that as long as they like.
I will never attack the Black Panther Party. I will attack political concepts that I think are damaging our people, and when I do that I will give my affirmative political concept. In our community today we have people who have no program other than attacking other people’s programs. That’s not the way you build revolution. We have many organizations in our community. We have the New Republic of Africa. We have the Muslims. We have the NAACP. We have the Urban League. We have SCLC. We have the Panthers. These organizations should come before the masses and affirmatively state what their program is, then let the masses decide which political philosophy they want to follow, that is, if one is truly concerned about organizing his people. At least that’s my feeling. I tell you this history because I think it is important for you to know and to understand it. What I have given you is the truth. It is even documented in Eldridge Cleaver’s book Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, so you should read that yourself and get that documentation.
Many people said I was a coward. They said I ran. When I came back, they said I was a CIA agent. Can’t win for losing. Many said that I was in “self-imposed exile.” Obviously that is incoherent nonsense. How could I be in exile when I am at home in Africa, where I came from, and when I left of my own free will?
All revolutions are based on historical analysis. Karl Marx bases his scientific study of the economic forces in an industrialized society on historical materialism. He says, and he is correct, that one must understand historical materialist forces in the society, and that means a complete study of those forces and a correct analysis. Malcolm X, in Malcolm X Speaks, in the essay “Message to the Grassroots,” says that of all the studies, history rewards us best. So Brother Malcolm X recognized the necessity of history. I speak before the Institute of the Black World, a forum that is trying to combine all of the studies of the black world and, according to it, make its focal point the writings and the research of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I think most of us would agree with that. We may have some quibble about whether or not Dr. King’s works should be the focal point of the Institute of the Black World, but none of us would quibble about the fact that his works must certainly be included because he contributed a fantastic amount of knowledge, time and energy to our movement. What we must not allow, just because he becomes the focal point, is a misinterpretation of history. I saw, for example, the Dr. Martin Luther King film a few weeks ago as soon as I entered the country, and I was very amazed to see that they left out the entire Black Power march in Mississippi! I don’t know who the people are who made the film, but I need to tell them that they cannot mess with the forces of history. They may try to say what they want, but the fact is that the Black Power march in Mississippi was an important factor in the lives of black people in this country and to leave that out is to try to mess with the forces of history. If you try to mess with the forces of history, you get crushed by the forces of history. So this is a fact. We cannot allow them to paint Dr. King into what he was not.
Martin Luther King taught us many things. We must understand what he taught us and accept it. He taught us how to confront. Dr. King did—not the Black Panther Party, not Malcolm X—Dr. Martin Luther King did. His tactic was nonviolence but he did teach us how to confront, and confront he did. We thank him for that. And he taught us how to mobilize the masses.
Dr. King, however, was not an astute politician, he was a man of the pulpit. For example, Dr. King never took a political position against the war in Vietnam, he always took a moral position against the war. There is nothing wrong with that. As a minister, he has the right to do that. But most of us have always taken political positions against the war in Vietnam. Dr. King was not the first black man to come out against the war in Vietnam in this country, nor was SCLC the first organization. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the first organization on a nationwide basis to do that. It is important for us to document our history and to document it correctly because, again, it is from our history that we make our analysis and understand revolutionary processes.
There are stages of liberation movement. The first stage is waking up our people. We have to wake them up to the impending danger. So we yell, Gun! Shoot! Burn! Kill! Destroy! They’re committing genocide! until the masses of our people are awake. Once they are awake, it is the job of the revolutionary intelligentsia to give them the correct political ideology. We don’t have it in this country—what we have in this country is an attitude, not an ideology; the attitude, the idea of confrontation, was started in our generation by Dr. King. And he was the first. You shouldn’t knock him for preaching nonviolence. The historical conditions only permitted nonviolent demonstrations at the time Dr. King started; nonviolence was the only possibility. All of you who condemn Dr. King today, you didn’t start talking about armed struggle until 1966, ’67, ’68, ’69 or last week. How could Dr. King talk about violence?
When I was a student at Howard University we almost got thrown out of school for bringing Malcolm X to speak there because we thought he had something to say. Malcolm X could not speak at many black institutions. When he spoke he was attacked by everybody, he was called crazy, irresponsible, stupid, this, that, and the minds of black people in this country were so whitewashed that they believed it. This is history. If the minds of people had been alert when Brother Malcolm X was offed, the same thing would have happened then that happened after Dr. Martin Luther King was offed. You should see the development of historical conditions. Dr. King preached nonviolence, Malcolm X said Yeah, we need guns to protect ourselves. Malcolm X got offed; we did nothing. Dr. King got offed; we tore up the country. It’s a historical development of the people. The people. Dr. King worked with what he had, and he gave us confrontation. We took that confrontation and we worked with it, and we worked with it and we developed it into armed struggle or at least to the point where we can talk about armed struggle.
Now then, this whole black world from South Africa to Nova Scotia is in political chaos merely because it has no ideology. If one does not have an ideology one can have no discipline. That’s been the problem of the black community. The Muslims, for example, have discipline. They have discipline because they have the same ideology. In the Christian Church, you have discipline. You have a structure. In order for the black community to come together we must find a common ideology. It is in seeking to find this common ideology that I come before you tonight. An ideology is merely a cohesive force, a set of principles, a set of beliefs that tell us where we’re going, what our goals are, and what we hope to achieve. Underneath that will come the tactics that give us the best way to achieve these goals. If I said that all of us decided that we wanted to go from here to downtown Atlanta, that would be our ideology—that’s our goal. We may argue about how best to get there, but we have the ideology—where we want to go. We want to go to downtown Atlanta. The problem in the black community today is that there are always arguments over tactics because there is no ideology. So you have people who are arguing about how to go, but they don’t know where they are going. That’s why we find so much confusion among black student unions and black college campus groups. They are arguing about tactics. They are arguing about how to go, but they haven’t decided where they want to go. Before you decide where you want to go, before you find your ideology, you must analyze what your problems are.
The black community today faces two problems: capitalism and racism. Some people in our community say that if you eliminate capitalism, you will automatically eliminate racism. I say this is not true. While I agree that capitalism reinforces racism and racism reinforces capitalism, it is nonsensical to say that if we got rid of capitalism we would automatically get rid of racism. There are many so-called communist and socialist societies in the world today that are rampant with racism. I don’t argue about which came first, whether capitalism produced racism or vice versa, but I say that racism today, even if it were produced by capitalism, has taken on such proportions, such institutions, that it has become an entity unto itself, and it must be dealt with as a separate entity.
In discussing capitalism and racism, I want to give a Marxist analysis of this society. I want to say that I’m not a Marxist-Leninist myself but I understand Karl Marx better than many people who call themselves Marxists-Leninists. He did not deal with the question of race; and in the twentieth century we see that race has not only become a phenomenon with the proportions of a class structure, but in many cases it has itself become an entity and a class unto itself. Let me explain that. Many people in this country are running around talking about black capitalism and black capitalists. Those people who are doing that do not understand capitalism. Karl Marx defines capitalist. He says that a capitalist is someone who owns and controls the means of production. He is absolutely correct. There is no other definition for a capitalist. There are people who work for the capitalist called the bourgeoisie. These are people who serve the interests of capitalism. Lenin calls them the lackeys of capitalism. Mao Tse-tung calls them “running dogs of capitalism.” There are potential capitalists, there are aspiring capitalists, but the only capitalist is someone who actually owns and controls the means of production. If you understand this definition according to Marx, then you will know that there is no such thing as a black capitalist anywhere in the world today.
Now, if we understand that, we can clear up a lot of the misunderstanding that has been disseminated in our community. One must always study. Marx says that the capitalists are death, that there is no hope for the capitalist. According to Marx, they must be killed. He says their underlying motive is profit. They will do anything for profit, so you can never stop them or get any concessions from them; they must be killed. If you understand that, then you know that all the capitalists in the world today are white. According to Karl Marx—not according to Stokely Carmichael, but according to Karl Marx.
Below the capitalist you have the bourgeoisie. These are the people who serve the interests of capitalism. For example, the owners of corporations are capitalists. The man who owns and controls General Motors is a capitalist. But the managerial director is not a capitalist. He is a lackey of capitalism. He’s a member of the bourgeoisie. We have white lackeys of capitalism, and we have the black lackeys of capitalism, yet these two groups are incapable of coming together because of the question of race. These are not the misdirected masses. The capitalists need to have these two groups come together because, according to Marx, the natural ally of the capitalist is the bourgeoisie. It is in the interest of the capitalist to have the white lackeys and the black lackeys come together because they are the ones who are going to fight for him. Yet the capitalists in this country are incapable of bringing them together, again because of the question of race. Because, according to Karl Marx, the white lackeys of capitalism and the black lackeys of capitalism should come together because it is the class interest that binds these people together, and since they have the same class interest, they should come together, but they do not because of race.
On the bottom of Marx’s analysis, of course, you have the urban proletariat, the workers, the peasants, the factory workers, the landless, misdirected masses. According to Marx these are the people who will lead the inevitable class struggle. We have seen that poor whites and poor blacks are incapable of coming together in this country, or when they do come together, we see it is the white man who benefits and having gained what he wants he turns against the black man. We have seen that time and time again. All coalitions of the two groups have always worked to the disadvantage of the black man. Let us view all coalitions between white groups and black groups in this country historically. There have been a number of them. We can go back to the Populist movement in Georgia and Tom Watson immediately after the Civil War. You remember the Populist movement? Tom Watson—came to black people, asked them to join hands with him to fight the white capitalists who were fleecing both of them. The black man joined with him, and after Mr. Watson secured political power, he turned on the black man, and advocated lynching. That’s history. We must remember that all revolutions are based on history. We must remember Brother Malcolm telling us that we must study history.
We can come up a little further and document the history of the labor movement in this country in the 1930s. The white workers came into the black community once again asking us to join with them and wage battle and we did that and today we cannot even get into the labor unions in this country. I know you are aware of these movements because you have read Black Power by Carmichael and Hamilton.
Recently, we had the coalition of the Black Panther Party and the Peace and Freedom Party. It should be analyzed in two areas—class and race. Marx says that the bourgeoisie will always come together and fight for the interests of the capitalist. But he says there are individuals inside the bourgeoisie who will betray their class interests and join the masses and fight with the masses. We have clear examples of that. Fidel Castro was a member of the aristocracy in Cuba. He betrayed his class interests, joined the masses, and led a successful revolution. Mao Tse-tung was an up-and-coming college student in China. He betrayed his class interests and led a successful revolution. So Marx says that there are individuals in this class who will betray their class interest and join us and fight. But Marx says we cannot expect all of them to join us because as a class they represent the economic interests of the capitalists. They’re the lackeys of capitalism. We see the Black Panther Party, which is supposed to represent the lumpen proletariat, the class that is economically insecure. They form an alliance with the Peace and Freedom Party, which represents the bourgeoisie, the economically secure. It is totally un-Marxist for the economically secure to make a coalition with the economically insecure, because the economically secure are not going to fight. “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” This is precisely what Marx was talking about: only those who have nothing to lose will fight. That has been proven if you analyze the situation in a racial context also. The Peace and Freedom Party made the alliance with the Black Panther Party. Today, we see twenty-eight members of the Black Panther Party dead. There is not one dead member of the Peace and Freedom Party—not one! We see the Chicago Seven after their fiasco in Chicago allowed to smoke pot on T.V. and go scot free, yet Bobby Seale is sitting up in jail. A clear analysis will once again show us that whenever these coalitions are made it is the black man who comes out at the bottom of the ladder.
Many people are carried away today thinking that the hippies and the yippies and the white mother-country radicals are revolutionary. They are not. What they engaged in at Chicago was what Lenin called “infantile disorder.” And that is precisely what it is. This country, we all agree, is moving toward fascism. When a country moves towards fascism, the most important right of the people is the right to demonstrate. The people in Chicago were arrested because of the right to demonstrate. But rather than continue to argue their case on their right to demonstrate, they concentrated on some nonsensical wearing of robes, cussing out a judge, laughing, and all of this nonsense, theatrics, and theater of the absurd. Nobody talks about the right to demonstrate; they talk about the courts. And what happened? They have given the courts an excuse to become more fascist. From their antics came three decisions from the courts: one, a defendant may be gagged and bound; two, he may be kept in prison until he agrees to be quiet; and third, they can conduct trials on closed circuit T.V., and now the Panther 21 must face the results of this fascist decision. Therefore, before we talk about alliances we must build our power base so that we are strong enough to achieve the gains we want and we depend upon no one but ourselves. The first law of revolution is “the law of self-sufficiency.”
Some people see the fight on our hands and they get so scared they start going to white folks for allies. They say, “We need allies, we can’t do it ourselves.” They’re not revolutionary. Because a revolutionary is self-sufficient! He depends upon himself first, foremost, and last. If he gets aid from a friendly country, he can accept it, but if he’s dependent upon that country for aid then he accepts the ideology and/or advice of the nation that gave him aid.
Today we need a clear understanding of where we’re going. It is no longer necessary for brothers to scream about guns and what we are going to do. To be revolutionary one must pick up the gun, but merely picking up the gun does not make you revolutionary. And we must understand this very carefully. There are a lot of brothers with guns. Some are shooting us! That’s not revolutionary! Merely because one has a gun in his hands does not make one revolutionary. What makes one revolutionary is not only having the gun, but the political ideology to go along with the gun. And that political ideology must speak the needs and aspirations of the masses of our people. Once you have that, plus the gun, then you have a revolutionary, because revolutionaries always fight on two levels: the political and the military.
I want to go back to Malcolm X for a minute. In the same “Message to the Grassroots,” Brother Malcolm says, in the final analysis all revolutions are fought over the question of land. He gives the example of the Chinese revolution and he gives the example of the Algerian revolution. He gives the example of the Mau Mau movement in Kenya. And over and over again, throughout the “Message,” Brother Malcolm keeps saying that in the final analysis revolution is fought over the question of land. Brother Malcolm is not the only one who says this. Mao Tse-tung says this. Ho Chi Minh says this. Fidel Castro says this. V. I. Lenin says this. Osagyefo says this. And Stokely Carmichael, as humble as I am, also says this.
Eldridge Cleaver quotes from Marx in his latest pamphlet, Revolution and Education. He says that if we’re fighting we must control the land because it is upon the land that we build the superstructure. Superstructure is a Marxist term, but I know that all of you have dealt at least with Marx and so you know what superstructure is. You read the Panther paper. They mention the word all the time. The superstructure is merely the intertwining, interlocked type of system that you have—the political, economic, and social system. But the superstructure is always based on the land. Revolution must be about land. It is from the land that we get everything we need for survival. It is from the land that we get our clothes, in the form of cotton. It is from the land that we get our food and the animals we take meat from. It is from the land that we get the mineral resources necessary for the development of a technological society. So we see that if we’re talking about revolution, and if we’re talking very seriously about revolution, we must be talking about land. Brother Malcolm is absolutely correct, many people say that they follow Brother Malcolm X. Unfortunately a lot of them do not read Brother Malcolm X. They just quote or misquote him. But it is time for us now to take time out to sit down and study and understand the things that Brother Malcolm X was talking about.
Mao Tse-tung says politics is war without bloodshed. War is politics with bloodshed. Remember what Malcolm X says—“in the final analysis, all revolution is fought over the question of land.” If we understand that, then we recognize the need for a land base. We see now that we have the three necessary ingredients if we’re to talk about ideology—we must speak to the problem of class, against capitalism; we must speak to the problem of race, against racism; and we must speak to the problem of land.
If we go back to our history, we will note that the groups that have the largest success in our community are those groups that deal with the question of land, class, and race. The Honorable Marcus Garvey organized around the concept of land in 1922—Back to Africa. Marcus Garvey had the largest organization in this country among black people. No other organization past or present has been able to match Mr. Garvey, simply because he dealt with the question of land, the question of race, and the question of class. If you knew Brother Malcolm X you would know that his basic ideology is Garveyism. His father was a Garveyite. Always we must understand our history, because we will see how it moves—from Garvey to Malcolm’s father, on to Malcolm, on down the line. The second largest organization that we’ve had, the largest one in our community, is the Muslims, again, because they are attempting to deal with the question of land, race, and class. Any organization that calls itself a revolutionary organization must deal with the question of land.
I want to talk about European settler colonies because, again, we’re dealing with land. A settler colony is an area of land where the European leaves Europe, comes to that area and takes over the land, and dominates the traditional owners of the land. My wife is from South Africa. South Africa is a settler colony. Rhodesia, which is really named Zimbabwe, is a settler colony. Europeans changed the name of Zimbabwe to Rhodesia, changed the name so that it appears as if they have always belonged there. Because if they say they’re Rhodesians and they come from Rhodesia you never question it and it appears as if they are the traditional owners of that land. You must understand the trick. The settlers’ aim is to make the colony an extension of their original country. Mozambique is a settler colony. Angola is a settler colony. Portuguese Guinea is a settler colony. Australia is a settler colony. My brothers and sisters, Israel is a settler colony. European Jews leave Europe, go to Palestine, change the name to Israel, expel the original inhabitants, the Palestinian Arabs, and dominate the land.
But, my brothers and sisters, more importantly for you and for me, we must come to understand that America and Canada are settler colonies. You have been whitewashed into believing that there was such a thing called the American Revolution. There was never such an animal. It was just sons fighting their parents for who’s going to take the loot. George Washington was born in England. He was fighting to control this piece of land. He wasn’t fighting a revolutionary fight. Revolution overturns systems, destroys, it’s bloody, it knows no compromise. What system did they overturn? None. They had slaves and they were taking this land from the red man. What system? They did the same thing in what they call Rhodesia, when they broke from England, in November 1965. The only difference is that the Rhodesians couldn’t afford armed struggle today because the political consciousness of the masses is aroused. But they could afford it in 1776, and then had the nerve to talk about the glorious American Revolution! What revolution? They were colonialists, they were not colonies. They were part of the mother country. Yes, they were white radicals from the mother country, England. America and Canada are settler colonies, but it is difficult for us to understand that because they are close to being successful settler colonies. In order to be a successful settler colony, one must commit genocide against the traditional owners of the land. That is exactly what the Europeans have done. After committing genocide, they changed the name to America. When you call them Americans, you make it sound as if they belong here. You do that because you want to call yourselves black Americans and you want to feel that you belong here too. But if we analyze history and if we agree that revolutions are based on historical analysis, we will see that they are not Americans, they are in fact European settlers. That’s all they are. Now I know what you will say: “Oh, but that happened a long time ago.” It might have happened five thousand years ago. I’m talking about history and fact. It is a fact that they are European settlers. And our ideology must analyze history.
If they are European settlers, guess what we are? We can’t be Afro-Europeans or black Europeans. We have to be an African people. See, if we say we are Americans, black Americans, or Afro-Americans, it means that we participated in committing genocide against the red man, and support the genocide that “Americans” are committing in Vietnam, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Since we did not, there’s no need for us to call ourselves black Americans. There is something you must understand about this problem of “Afro-American” and “black American.” You can be walking down the street and you may see a person who is of Chinese descent. They look Chinese, right? Now they may have been in America for as many generations as we have been here. They may not be able to speak a word of Chinese, but when you see them, the first thing you say is “That’s a Chinaman.” You never say that’s a Chino-American, because there are two levels on which one is identified. One is identified by one’s nationality—that’s what your passport is, the papers you carry—and by one’s ancestral bearing. Yet for all other people, as soon as we recognize them on the street we never question their nationality. We always go back to their ancestral bearings. They’re Chinese or Japanese, or they’re Indians—except us. When it comes to us, the first question is, Where are you from? “Oh, I’m from Jamaica.” “Oh, you’re a West Indian.” “Where are you from?” “I’m from Georgia.” “Oh, you’re an American.” “Where’re you from?” “I’m from Kenya.” “Oh, you’re a Kenyan.” “Where’re you from?” “I’m from Ghana.” “Oh, you’re a Ghanaian.” No, my brothers and sisters, we are all Africans.
This concept must become clear in our minds, especially since we say we’re dealing with the question of capitalism and racism. Everyone knows that the racist of the world is that European white boy. There’s no need to even discuss that. A settler colony is, by its very nature, an unjust and immoral political state. Wherever the European has gone, he has set up a settler colony, whether he is the majority or the minority. There are Europeans in Palestine, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in Australia, in Canada, in the United States, in Latin America—wherever he has gone he has established settler colonies. He has a settler complex.
I have outlined what I think have been some of the problems and some of the areas in which we must move that logically lead to Pan-Africanism. Many people have accepted the slogan of Black Power, some people have tried to make it mean what they want it to mean. The highest political expression of Black Power is Pan-Africanism. Black Power means that all people who are black should come together, organize themselves and form a power base to fight for their liberation. That’s Black Power.
Unfortunately, my adopted tribe in America is very tribalistic. They think that Black Power means only them. They actually think they are the only black people in the world. Obviously, we must tell our brothers and sisters in America that this just isn’t so. There are black people in South America, there are black people in the Caribbean and there are a whole lot of black people in Africa. Black Power must mean all of these peoples. It has to, unless you want to be a racist and discriminate against other black people.
It must be Pan-Africanism, because we said that in a revolution one must have a land base. Now we must discuss where black people in this country can best get a land base. This is where the difficulty will arise. Many people will say that we can get a land base in America. If we’re fighting against capitalism inside America, and if we know anything about capitalism, we know that the white boy isn’t going to give up any land. You must take every inch of the ground from him. The revolutionary formula for taking land is simply seize, hold, develop, and expand. That’s how we’re going to have to take land in this country. We’ll have to seize it, we’ll have to hold it, and we’ll have to develop it. We see clearly from the Muslims’ example that even when they try to buy the land, the white boy won’t let them have it. If we could seize the land we wouldn’t be able to hold it, and if we could hold it, we wouldn’t be able to develop it.
Many people say in this country that we should take Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina and make those our United States. Now let’s examine those states. Louisiana gives us some oil. Birmingham has some steel. The vast areas of these states are agricultural states. They produce cotton and tobacco. So that means that if we took these states and set up a nation we would have the greatest cotton- and tobacco-growing nation in the world. However, we wouldn’t have any industry because there are no mineral resources to be found in these states. And if we’re fighting against imperialism, we realize that our enemy is a highly technological enemy, so we must develop technology in order to fight him. If we seized this land, if we held this land, we would have an agricultural society. From what would we produce our tanks, airplanes, and guns—those things that are necessary to fight imperialism? An agricultural nation could never defeat an industrial society. Therefore, we must ask ourselves where best can we get land. My brothers and sisters, I ask you to look with me to Africa.
It is the richest continent in the world. It has all of the mineral resources necessary for the highest technological society in the world today. It has bauxite, copper, zinc, diamonds, gold, oil, ore, cocoa. Man it’s even got peanuts, that’s how rich it is.
It seems to me any clear black ideology that talks about revolution, understanding the necessity of a land base, must be pointed toward Africa, especially since we’ve decided that we’re an African people and Africa belongs to all African peoples. It is our homeland! Those people who don’t look toward Africa consider themselves Americans. That’s their right. They want to consider themselves Americans, they have the right to fight for this land, take it from the white boy, exterminate the red man and then keep it. For me, I don’t want to be a part of that. We must ask ourselves what relationship Africa has to us while we are here in the Western Hemisphere. We must ask what our relationship to Africa is and how do we survive here at the same time. Having answered those two questions, we have found the key to our ideology. We know that we came from Africa. We may not want to call ourselves Africans, but we cannot deny that we were stolen from Africa.
Let’s examine power and how it protects the individual. When a white boy comes into our community, we are not afraid of that white boy as an individual; we are afraid of him because of the power he represents. And he is respected wherever he goes. When we see an African anywhere in the world he is not respected because there is no power behind him. That is precisely why the European can go all over the world and people bow down to him—because of the power he represents. Where are we going to get power from? The hippies? Is that being revolutionary? By cursing? Is that the best they can teach us? They tell me that Malcolm X came from the grass roots, they told me he came from the gutter, from the slums, they told me he was in jail. I have heard him speak many times and I have never heard him curse. Never. Because he respected his people. Revolution is not about being dirty or about cursing but about giving our people the finer things in life. If we want to curse or shoot dope, cut each other or stand still, then we don’t have to fight. You know, we can stay right here and do it. We are fighting to get out of those conditions, not to stay in them. Nobody risks his life to shoot dope, or risks his life to curse, or risks his life to prove how bad he is—we are fighting other people to get rid of oppression, we want a better way of life. That’s why we fight.
You saw that white boy Dick Cavett—when I was on his show, he wanted to talk about the shades and about the college, he didn’t want to talk about what we were supposed to talk about. You can run but you can’t hide, you’ve got to come to it sometime or later. But they’re not going to let us on their T.V. show and really break down the truth to our people. The only people they’re going to let on T.V. are those going through the streets yelling “Yeah, we’re going to kill you, we’re going to do this or that, which only gives the honky an excuse to move farther into fascism and prepare to wipe us out. These are the ones who are not giving us the political ideology. We need political ideology. We are divided fighting ourselves merely because we don’t know where we’re going or what we want. Some say all we want is freedom, we just want freedom. Some say we want peace, everybody wants peace. I don’t want peace. I want power.
The African has no power anywhere!
The same question that the Honorable Marcus Garvey asked in 1922 is still relevant today: Where is the black man’s government? Where is the government that is going to speak for our protection? If Mother Africa was unified, my brothers and sisters, as quiet as it’s kept, it would be the most powerful continent in the world. More powerful than this monster, more powerful than China, more powerful than Russia. It would be the most powerful continent in the world. It could then give protection to all its descendants, wherever they may be.
We’re dealing with the relationship of power, and I say we must make Africa our priority. We must deal clearly now with Africa and begin to support the movements for liberation on the continent. If you have children, you give your children everything, because they represent the future. Your mothers and fathers worked very hard for you to come to college because you represent the future. If we are honest with ourselves, we know that there is no future in Babylon, U.S.A.
We see the black bourgeoisie having many problems because there is no viable alternative for them to earn a living. They must give their skills to the white boy, and they’re becoming more worried with the fact that this is the only way for them to make a living. There is no possible way for them to build a nation within this country. It is possible for our people to begin to build a nation inside Mother Africa. A true revolutionary must provide a viable alternative, not just rhetoric condemning the existing system.
The Jews set the precedent. European Jews, who live here and function inside this American political system, get up and talk about Israel. Whenever Jewish senators take the floor they wage propaganda for Israel. As a matter of fact, when the President of France came here, European Jews, 4,000 strong, picketed him because he was giving fighter planes to Libya, which is in Africa! My brothers and sisters, do you not recognize what these European Jews were saying? They were saying that Africa has no right to have any guns, but Israel has the right to have all the guns she wants. Do you know that right now the so-called state of Israel is fighting Egypt? Are you not aware of the fact that Egypt is part of Africa? So you have European Jews, who are talking about Israel, occupying land in Palestine that doesn’t belong to them, supporting that concept—and here we are, from Africa, we belong to that land, and we are not supporting it!
What should we do? Should we all go back to Africa? “Are you saying we should all go back to Africa?” No, I am not saying we should all go back to Africa at this point. We all have to go back there sooner or later though. If this white boy keeps on going the way he’s going, a whole lot of people will be running as fast as they can go to get there. No, we’re not saying that. What we’re saying is that we must begin to understand Africa, not only culturally, but politically, and we must begin to support those movements of liberation that seek to build truly revolutionary states in Africa that will support us. In the meantime, in our own communities, we should do three things. Number one, we should seek to unify our community. We’re not blind; we see genocide around the corner. Political groups who have disagreements should try and keep their disagreements under the table, rather than attacking each other, calling names like “pork chop nationalists” and “cultural nationalists,” or “CIA agents” and playing into the hands of our enemies. Keep that in the background. Don’t attack anybody, just say what you’ve got to say, brother. Run your program to the people and let them decide. If you believe you have the correct ideology, all you have to do is get before the masses of your people, state your ideology and go to work. If they agree with you, they’ll come with you; if they don’t agree with you, they’ll go with the other person. If they go with the other person, you’re wrong. Whether you admit it or not you’re wrong because in a revolution it is the masses who decide, not the self-appointed vanguard. We must seek to unify our community.
Second, we must seek to take over all of the political institutions inside our community: the police station, the judicial system, the board of education, the welfare system, especially the education system, because education is nothing but an ideology, you’re hip to that. Ninety per cent of your education is the ideology of that society. We need to give our people the correct political ideology; therefore, we’ve got to have these schools. But we know that today we are not going to have these schools without confrontation. Overt, open confrontation, however, is no longer the way. We’re going to organize politically to take them over. If we don’t get them, there will be political consequences against those people who are standing in the path of the masses—again because of history.
All of the political institutions inside our community should be taken over, and they can be taken over today without confrontation. The stage we have reached is that of education, not confrontation! In an army you don’t just keep confronting, confronting, confronting, like cowboys and Indians riding from New York to California. You don’t do that. In a revolution, you confront, you seize, you hold, you develop—then, after you’re ready, you go again. You seize, you hold, you develop, you expand, you stop, you go again. If you keep confronting, confronting, confronting, and you don’t organize what you have gained, you leave your rear open for attack by the enemy. And that’s precisely what’s happening in the black community today and on many black college campuses today. We refuse to take time out to organize our people—the real work in revolution.
America is showing the internal contradictions of capitalism Marx speaks about. She is obviously divided. Now, what we know about white folks is that they’re always united around one question—us. On the question of race, white America is a monolithic structure. Therefore, since the country must move to fascism in order to avoid internal collapse, we must not allow the white leaders of this country to use us for the justification of that fascism. We must allow them to have their internal contradictions, justify it among themselves while we quietly organize and educate our masses so that when they come we will be well prepared to meet them. We’re not prepared to meet them now! They’re also not completely prepared to meet us now. That means that time must be put to the best use. We must begin to organize and prepare for the inevitable confrontation.
Thirdly, we must try to develop independent economic bases beginning with our organizations. When our organizations become economically independent, they will speak to our needs. Now that responsibility is on all of us. Merely clapping is not going to do it. That means it must be our responsibility to donate money to those organizations—to be willing to pay dues. We’ve been talking about “they getting support from the white man,” but that’s because nobody’s been supporting them. Now we must begin to support them, because then we can hire and fire them. Yes sir, praise the Lord, we need to do that. Once again, we must caution that these economic bases cannot make money for individuals but must be used to benefit the entire black community. We must understand that most, if not all, of these enterprises in our community are incapable of producing goods, because we do not own or control the means of production in the larger society. But we must nonetheless attempt to establish independent economic bases wherever possible.
Now, many say that I am counterrevolutionary because I am speaking out against drugs in the community. Unfortunately, they know nothing about the history of revolution. If they did they would know that Mao Tse-tung fought against opium. They would know that Ho Chi Minh fought against opium. The would know that Fidel Castro fought against drugs, and if they saw Battle of Algiers they would remember that the brothers in the NLF fought against drugs and killed the pusher. Fighting against drugs is revolutionary because drugs are a trick of the oppressor. The reason why drug use has reached the proportion it has today in our community is that the political consciousness of our people is rising, and in order to dull the political consciousness of our people, the oppressor sends more drugs into the community.
I have always felt that the highest criterion for a revolutionary is that he must have undying love for his people. To quote Che Guevara (and you should read him) : “At the risk of sounding romantic, a revolutionary must have a superhuman love for the masses of people.” If one is concerned with one’s people, one cannot see them committing genocide and stand idly by. People who are taking drugs are slowly committing genocide. If you care about them, you must speak out against the pushers of drugs in our community. We can clearly say to them, Look, man, we know you have to make a living somehow, we know because it’s tough down here in this ghetto, a whole lot of funny things going on down here, but all of us have to walk tall. We can’t be giving drugs to our people. A man has to walk tall. Now, you find another outlet for your drugs. You find another community for your drugs, but don’t put it inside here, because you’re killing our youth, and if you kill our youth, you kill our army, and if we don’t have an army we can’t fight and we’re finished. And I believe in at least having a fighting chance.
To return to my second point, we must take over all these political institutions and that can be done through our politicians. Our politicians today have a great deal of power. The fact is that they have derived this power from the masses of our people. Especially since the slogan Black Power became popular. That’s when all of them began to spring up. But they combine the concepts of Black Power with the frustrations of the masses and they use it to further themselves. This is opportunism. In our dialectic they are called “Black Power pimps.” But you needn’t worry about them, because if you know about revolution you would know that in the law of revolution they will be crushed. I have nothing to do with that. That is the law of revolution. The Bible says that in so many different ways, you know, whatever you sow, that you shall reap. Bible, not me. You don’t have to worry about them, ain’t too many more left anyhow.
They can’t even sell themselves. They run to the white man: Yeah, I can do this, I can do that; white man doesn’t even listen to them any more. There was a time when they could run up there and say to the white man, “There’s been a rebellion in Chicago, there’s been a rebellion in Watts, and if you don’t give us some poverty money, there’s going to be a rebellion in Washington,” and the man gave them some money. But that’s over now, because there have been rebellions all over. Not only that, but the white boy is prepared for rebellions today. He was buying time with his poverty program, because he wasn’t prepared for rebellions. He wasn’t prepared to deal with spontaneous rebellions in this black community. But he’s prepared now. And since he’s prepared now, our tactics must change. We’ve got to stay one step ahead of him. These political institutions can be taken over today through our politicians—by calling our politicians together and forcing them to unite and speak to our needs. We can begin to do so and I’ll show you how later. But first, I want to repeat my ideology again and then follow with my tactics. Africa becomes our priority, number one. We seek for unity within our community, number two. We seek to take over the political institutions within our community, number three, and we seek to develop independent economic bases wherever possible, starting with our organizations. The police department must be taken over in our community. The judicial districts in our community must be taken over, and that can be done very easily. Then we’ll say when a man commits a crime he will be tried in the area where he lives. Once you do that, you have automatically dismissed the question of a trial by the jury of one’s peers. And of course, in our community, things will be different. Property damage will not mean as much. For us it will be human damage that will become the important thing. For example, if a brother raped a sister, he must get the death penalty immediately because he’s touched a flower of the earth. He must get death because he has no respect for our women. In any ideology, while you’re teaching and speaking to your ideology, you must have some sort of consequence if you disobey. That’s what Christianity is about—if you don’t do right you go to hell. That’s what it boils down to, right? But since we are talking about an ideology that’s secular, one that deals with the earth, if you commit a sin while you’re here, you will pay for it while you’re here.
We can rearrange our priorities once we have control of our judicial systems within our community. It can be done very easily. We can organize the black lawyers in our community to begin to speak to that. Many people say, Well, you can’t get lawyers to do this and you can’t get them to do that. That’s true, but the reason is because we do not take time to organize. The black lawyers in our community have black clients, not white clients. Very few of them have white clients. If we pay the salary, we call the tune. That’s how it is. They don’t join the struggle, they don’t have clients, simple as that. It calls, however, for organization. Many people are not willing to organize, they want to rap. They want to talk about how bad they are, but they’re not willing to organize, and organization is our only solution. We must organize. We must take over the police stations in our community, because the honky policemen do not care about us. They’re not here to protect us, they’re only here to repress us. I want to tell you as a student of politics that the white policeman must withdraw from our community. They’ve got to go because we’re peace-loving people and if they don’t go I tell you as a student of politics that sniping against white policemen will escalate in our community. I am a student of politics. I studied politics well and I know it very, very well. I’m not here tonight to advocate violence or to advocate guerrilla warfare—that’s a crime that can cause one’s imprisonment and it is silly today for someone to go to jail for advocating guerrilla warfare. What I’m about to tell you is what is going to happen. Now, tomorrow I don’t want you to go downtown and tell the man Carmichael said we should go get guns. No. No. Tell him Carmichael said “Given what is going down in this country, we are going to get guns.”
Carmichael didn’t say that you should go out and become guerrillas. Carmichael said “Given what is happening in the country, you are going to become guerrillas.” Because I am giving an analysis, I am not encouraging guerrilla warfare. But while we are talking about guerrilla warfare, since I have been invited by the Institute of the Black World to lecture, and to lecture as a political scientist, and since in my area I have covered and done some academic work on guerrilla warfare, I would like to speak to you about guerrilla warfare largely on an academic level tonight.
I am not saying that you should go out and start sniping policemen, but I am saying that if they do not withdraw from our community, sniping will escalate. We must understand how it will escalate. People have been discussing guerrilla warfare in this country. I would like, on an academic level, to explain how guerrilla warfare really works. You should take notes because you’re students and you have to discuss these lectures. I mean you paid me to come here, you shouldn’t sit there and waste your time, you should take notes—discuss it. If I’m right or if I’m wrong, discuss guerrilla warfare. A guerrilla never works in groups of more than three or five. Never. And the guerrilla never works with anybody he has not known for a long period of time. Any time you have thirteen people, or twenty-one people planning a conspiracy, that’s not a guerrilla movement. You must remember the number one law of a guerrilla—the guerrilla’s main supplier of arms is the enemy. That means when the guerrilla kills a member of the occupying army, he not only takes the gun that’s around his waist, he opens up the door and he takes a 12-gauge shotgun. He opens up the trunk and takes all the ammunition, and he splits. Because the guerrilla must be victorious. And he buries the arms, in different places—only a little bit at a time. The guerrilla never stashes his arms at the office so that when the occupying army kick down the door they take all the guns. That makes no sense if one understands guerrilla warfare. The guerrilla hides his guns in areas here and there. The guerrilla knows how to break down the gun. He knows how to do it at night with his eyes closed. He can put together a gun and take it apart. He knows how to take care of guns, and the guerrilla never runs his mouth about how bad he is. That’s a gorilla! Never! Never! But General Giap from North Vietnam quotes Mao that the guerrilla is like the fish in the sea. That is the theory. The guerrilla functions among the masses. It is from the masses that the guerrilla gets his support. Not only that, it’s the masses that he hides among. If the masses are wearing dashikis, the guerrilla wears a dashiki. If the masses are in church, the guerrilla is in church. Wherever the masses are, there the guerrilla is, and if you understand Christianity, you understand its real revolutionary message: “Wherever two or three are gathered, there I shall be also.” The guerrilla never allows the enemy to provoke him into an attack before he is certain of victory. The guerrilla cannot afford defeat. He can only move when he is certain of victory. The masses are constantly watching the guerrilla, and if he is not victorious, they will not follow him. The guerrilla recruits from the masses. His goal is to make the masses guerrillas like himself. Therefore, as the guerrilla is more victorious, the masses will have more confidence in him. The enemy tries to make the guerrilla appear ridiculous in the eyes of the masses. He provokes the guerrilla, and if the guerrilla is stupid or miscalculates, he reacts to the provocation. Of course he dies a heroic death or is captured, but the masses will not follow him—only adventurers will. The masses want victory, not heroic deaths. We are all willing to die, but we want to know there is at least a chance of victory. If the guerrilla wants to move the masses, he must be organizing among the masses. There is one other thing that you must know about the guerrilla—the guerrilla studies. Now, if we’d all been doing that for fourteen months, we’d have a good nationwide organization in this country. We could have an above-ground political organization that will say, “We want the police stations.” If the police stations are not delivered, a political consequence is dealt by the guerrilla. The guerrilla backs up the demands of the above-ground political organization. Again, I’m only speaking to you as an academician, merely as an academician, but I want to explain the theories to you.
The time of the guerrilla is limited, his time becomes very important. He can’t waste time sitting up in an office jiving about revolution. If a guerrilla has a job, when he comes home from work, he studies, he studies. If you’re talking about revolution, you had better get hip to studying. If you’re not studying, you’re doing nothing but fooling yourself. If you are a revolutionary today in the black community you must know Marx, you must know Lenin, you must know Malcolm X, Mao, Che, Fidel, Sékou Touré, Ho Chi Minh, you must know DuBois, you must know Nkrumah, you must know Lumumba, you must know Huey P. Newton, you must know LeRoi Jones, Robert Williams, you must know Fannie Lou Hamer, you must know a whole lot of people, a whole lot. Their ideas and their ideologies. Aside from that you must know what is going on in the world at the same time. You must understand the Warsaw pact and NATO, and what they represent. You must understand the internal contradictions of capitalism inside America. All these things are necessary if you are a true revolutionary. If you don’t understand that, you’re just running your mouth, because revolution is a science, and you’ve got to be scientific.
In a guerrilla movement you have an above-ground organization, and one below the ground—the military organization. The political organization makes the political demands. If they are not met, the guerrilla moves. No one knows who the guerrilla is. The guerrilla might be the same people in the political organization, for certainly the guerrilla must have a political ideology. You see, for example, all of us could come to a meeting. Let’s say we call a meeting to decide we should have a police station here. All of you may be guerrillas, but we’re not discussing guerrilla action. We make up our demands, and we go: “This is our demand, we want the police station, we want it in two weeks. You know? We want you to turn it over to our politicians. We want to be able to decide who our police captains are, because we want to clean up our community, and clearly the police are not doing it for us.” And if the police station doesn’t come to us in two weeks, maybe ten white policemen would be dead, their guns gone. In other words, the guerrilla deals a political consequence to the enemy. That’s guerrilla warfare. The next time the political arm comes to speak, it has a real power base behind it, the community will begin to support the demands, and they will support the guerrilla actions if the demands are not met. You see, if you’re talking about guerrilla warfare, you’re talking about a highly organized community. You cannot have guerrilla warfare unless the community is thoroughly organized, and the community must be cleaned up. We cannot function in the community if we are afraid that if our sisters are out after twelve, or after eleven, or after dark, somebody might knock them in the head, take their pocketbook and run to buy some dope. We can’t function if we’re worried that some brother is trying to get us, we have to function free. For example, there are a lot of times the brothers may not be able to do something, so a sister’s got to do it. You want to know that if a sister is running through the streets at two or three o’clock in the morning she has absolutely nothing to worry about. As a matter of fact, every brother is protecting her. Just for the functioning of guerrilla warfare, it is a necessity that we clean up and unite our community. We must do that.
I want to go back and talk about Ghana before I end. Lenin said that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. He is correct. Osagyefo, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, says that neo-colonialism is the last stage of imperialism. He didn’t say it was another stage. He didn’t say it was the highest stage, he said it was the last stage of imperialism, and he’s correct. We see that in neo-colonialist states in Africa, today. One of them is Ghana. The contradictions have arisen in Ghana. We see more and more the masses of people moving clearly forward to take that state. The people of Ghana are going to fight to take that state. They’re going to crush the American-supported Busia regime into oblivion. That is written in the wind—the historical forces cannot be stopped. When they move to do that, my brothers and sisters, we must move to support them. If that state is taken, and Osagyefo, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, returns, we will have a land base that will be the first step towards the unification of our motherland and the first concrete victory of my ideology, which is Nkrumahism—the highest political expression of Pan-Africanism. I know you would not understand this because you haven’t been allowed to read books by Kwame Nkrumah. There must be a reason for that. They called him a traitor, they called him a tyrant, they called him everything that is bad in the world, but Brother Malcolm X told you when they say something bad about a man then that’s the man you should run to. The white boy seeks to destroy the leaders in our movement. And we are the people who are carried away with this nonsensical Western ideology: Oh, we don’t need any leaders, we just need the right idea. Nonsense. A leader is the embodiment of the idea, it is he who carries that idea. Do you think that China would be China without Mao Tse-tung? Do you think Vietnam would be Vietnam without Ho Chi Minh? Do you think Cuba would be Cuba without Fidel Castro? Do you think England would be England without Churchill? Do you think France would be France without De Gaulle? Obviously not; a leader is the incorporation of ideas. Everybody knows this but us, we never protect our leaders until after they’re dead; then we run to them. And the reason we do that is that we know once that leader has the correct ideology then nothing stands before us but the struggle or the open grave. But I will tell you that’s right. I’m not going to tell you anything but the truth. The only thing I see before you is bloodshed, bloody, bloody bloodshed. But I’m going to tell you something else, that you can’t run because they will try to kill you anyway, so you might as well prepare yourself for the fight. As Joe Louis says, “You can run but you can’t hide.”
I must tell you that the bloodshed that is coming for the Africans all over the world is a bloodshed that this world has never seen. Our struggle will be longer than the Vietnamese, our struggle will be more bloody than the Chinese Revolution, our struggle will be so bloody that sometime you will have to step over your brother while he is dead and keep running to hope you will avenge his death tomorrow. That’s the bloodshed that lies before you. I do not lie to you. I do not promise you a quick victory. How can you say that in five years we’re going to rip off the country? No, we have a generation of fight ahead of us, and whether you like it or not you had better prepare for it, because it’s coming. If you think this white boy is not getting ready for a full genocide thing, you’ve got another thought coming. He does nothing but commit genocide against us. But I will also tell you with all the arrogance in the world that we will win!
We are going to win and it is already written in the wind. Check out the difference between us and the Jews when the Nazis started to commit genocide against them. They got the Jews to cooperate with them. They had Jews who were policemen; they had Jews who were on the governing board; they had Jews on all these boards, and the Jews were the ones who were carrying out the orders so the Nazis could say it’s not us, it’s the Jews and then they pulled the Uncle Tom Jews up. The reverse is beginning to happen in our communities. A month ago Roger Wilkins, a black man, even told them, “You can’t use me against my people, if you think I am an Uncle Tom.” He refused to serve on one of the Nixon committees.
We have to understand the processes of genocide so we’ll understand precisely what they’re doing. When the Germans got ready to commit genocide against the Jews, they weeded out all the generals from the army. Does it sound familiar? They’re weeding them out here, even if you don’t know it. You dig it? They started to isolate the Jewish community. They’re doing it here, if you can dig it. It’s a slower process, but they’re doing it. They began to move to cut off all of the assistances to the Jewish communities. Check out your welfare cutoff, check it out. We can play no more, play time is over. Ain’t nothing out here but serious business. If you play you’re going to get burned, so you might as well get serious and take a few with you. When they went in to get the Jews, the Jews didn’t resist, until it was the last few of them left. But in our community, the reverse is true. They’ve tried to come into our community to get twenty-eight Black Panthers, the rank and file of the Panther Party, the most noble of our warriors. It cost them a bloody battle for the first twenty-eight, and instead of us becoming afraid, we become more arrogant when we drink of their blood, and become more determined. The next twenty-eight that they come to try and get, they’re going to have to pay twice as high the price they paid for the first twenty-eight.
In closing, my brothers and sisters, during the past fourteen months, I have been to Egypt, Tanzania, Nigeria, Congo Brazzaville, Sierra Leone, Senegal, the Sudan, and, of course, I live under the progressive leadership of the great President Ahmed Sékou Touré in Guinea. I have spoken to people all over Africa. I have spoken at youth rallies, I have spoken at universities, I have spoken with government officials, and in these circles the support for Osagyefo, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, is growing by leaps and bounds! My wife and I visited in Nigeria in February and I had the opportunity to speak at the University of Ibadan, the same university, incidentally, that Brother Malcolm X spoke at. I had the greatest pleasure of my life when I spoke on the very same platform that Brother Malcolm spoke on in Nigeria.
When Osagyefo was overthrown in 1965, the Nigerian press said, Good, the tyrant is gone, the traitor is finished, it’s all over. The dictator of Africa, the man who wanted Africa for himself, is gone. Can you dig this! They said the man who wanted Africa for himself is finished. The white boy drew up boundaries and gave them Nigeria, they were content with Nigeria. I want the steak, I don’t want the crumbs. If the meat belongs to me I’m going to have it or nobody is going to get it. That’s the way I work. I don’t want crumbs, I won’t fight for crumbs, I’m fighting for the steak. My life is on the line, so I’m going for broke. I won’t go through that, if I take one step, get a little piece, take another—no, it belongs to me. Keep your hands off of it, it’s mine. That’s right. And until I get it, I’m going to keep trying to get it. If all I’m doing is sitting in a corner and watching you, don’t think I’ve forgot, I’m scheming my brains off to get it. Dig it? You see me lying down in the corner don’t say, Oh, he’s finished. I’m not finished, I’m scheming for the best way to get it, and the quickest way to get it too. Ghana is going to be taken by the masses of Ghanaians. Osagyefo will return to Ghana, and we must support that movement.
Keep on fighting, they can’t wipe us out. They have killed a lot of us and they will kill a lot more. But we will study, organize, and prepare, and we will win—we will destroy them as sure as the night follows day! For in the final analysis, revolution is always about the truth and justice—that which is just. And of all the people on the face of this earth, we are the most just.