“It is ironic to talk about civilization in this country. This country is uncivilized. It needs to be civilized. It needs to be civilized.”So said the always-shocking civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), speaking at the University of California Berkeley on October 29, 1966. That was about two years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was at that time only sporadically enforced. Carmichael, a former Freedom Rider and the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, wanted his audience to look in a mirror and see the opposite side of their well-meaning but self-centered viewpoint.
Carmichael reidentified the civil rights problem. That is, he refocused his audience’s attention. The larger question that Carmichael implied (but never fully answered) was, can the United States reform racist practices? Those practices might have included Jim Crow, Voting rights? Lynching? Housing discrimination. He left the answer to history. Indeed, he left the question to history.
One of the civil rights movement’s more polarizing figures, Carmichael was, like Martin Luther King, Jr., shadowed by the FBI as a potential subversive. Although he shared King’s nonviolent approach, his speeches carried a bit of sting.
_______________
_______________
How did Carmichael argue for his point? All arguments start with premises. Here are two possible premises about the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. At the most, only one can be true.
Premise #1: The regular idea, right out of the history books, says that civil rights laws gave rights to minority people.If, like many of us today in 2024, we think the problem is Premise #1, we still put white people in charge. Only if we see Premise #2 do we understand universal civil rights. Do we believe in #1? Or #2? Not an easy question! If it is #1, the majority generously (or grudgingly) shares its rights. Suppose, however, that we agree with the United States of America’s Founders that rights are universal, given by God: “endowed by their Creator,” as the Declaration of Independence says, “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That would be Premise #2. Right?
Premise #2: Carmichael instead insisted that everyone already has rights, while civil rights laws merely help white racists control their behavior.
Conventional Analysis:
In other words, Carmichael reversed our conventional vision. The conventional view says that civil rights laws opened doors that had blocked minority individuals from making economic, political, and social progress. As the History Channel explains:
See the point? In this dramatic photo, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with an almost entirely white entourage. Now, by the conventional analysis, civil rights laws expanded human rights, protecting minority groups from oppression. “Ended segregation,” it says, and “banned employment discrimination.” We often think of civil rights legislation as a case of the majority voters, who were, in the mid-1960’s, mostly white, generously turning loose of their control and granting voting rights and other rights to African Americans and other minority groups.
In other words, Carmichael reversed our conventional vision. The conventional view says that civil rights laws opened doors that had blocked minority individuals from making economic, political, and social progress. As the History Channel explains:
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement.”
 |
| Lyndon Johnson Signs Civil Rights Act of 1964 |
See the point? In this dramatic photo, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with an almost entirely white entourage. Now, by the conventional analysis, civil rights laws expanded human rights, protecting minority groups from oppression. “Ended segregation,” it says, and “banned employment discrimination.” We often think of civil rights legislation as a case of the majority voters, who were, in the mid-1960’s, mostly white, generously turning loose of their control and granting voting rights and other rights to African Americans and other minority groups.
Carmichael, however, utterly denied that analysis. He said that those rights already existed.
Carmichael’s Analysis
Looking at the mirror image of civil rights, Carmichael’s point was that Black people—all people, actually—already have rights. After reviewing a vast intellectual tradition, including the founders of the American Republic and existentialist philosophers, Carmichael insisted that we all have rights by virtue of being human. We don’t, Carmichael insisted, have rights just because someone passed a law granting us rights that otherwise would escape us. That, he said, was a contradiction:
“The philosophers Camus and Sartre raise the question whether or not a man can condemn himself.”Carmichael said no. Carmichael said that it makes no sense to think that a white racist society could pass laws condemning its own nature. Instead, he explained that society would never, could never, condemn itself.
A Horrifying Example
To illustrate that point, Carmichael gave a stark example from 1964’s infamous “Mississippi burning” case. In that horror (two short years before Carmichael’s speech), vigilantes, with unofficial support from the Neshoba County, Mississippi government, had murdered three civil rights workers. Carmichael showed that the people who elected a racist sheriff would never condemn that same sheriff for doing the evil things that they elected him to do:
“On a more immediate scene, the officials and the population—the white population—in Neshoba County, Mississippi—that’s 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 to condemn him will be for them to condemn themselves.”And Carmichael had a point! After the Mississippi trial, the judge gave the killers light sentences, commenting that “They killed one n*****, one Jew, and a white man. I gave them what I thought they deserved.”
In that example, racism vanquished justice, and the judge made a ruling that fit his racist beliefs.
Carmichael Sided with Thomas Jefferson!
That is why Carmichael said the nation was “uncivilized.” His harsh idea was not new. Thomas Jefferson, his words now engraved on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC, stated:
“Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”Likewise, said Carmichael, it was white people who needed a civil rights law, precisely to restrain racist behavior:
“You need a civil rights bill, not me. I know I can live where I want to live.” [italics added]Sometimes, an exceptional speaker like Carmichael, like Jefferson, turns a controversial issue around, showing us a new light, giving us a new way to think.
Black people, Carmichael insisted, already understood the issue:
“I knew that I could vote and that that wasn’t a privilege; it was my right. Every time I tried, I was shot, killed or jailed, beaten or economically deprived. So somebody had to write a bill for white people to tell them, ‘When a Black man comes to vote, don’t bother him.’ That bill, again, was for white people, not for Black people; so that when you talk about open occupancy, I know I can live anyplace I want to live. It is white people across this country who are incapable of allowing me to live where I want to live.”Yet, Carmichael pointed out the contradiction: civil rights laws, passed by a white majority, could never condemn the people who wrote and passed them. So, could civil rights laws, in any important sense, undo racism’s basic wickedness? Or is it Carmichael, who, wrapped up in his existentialist pessimism, could not see the nation make progress? As we work through the year 2024, those vital questions remain on the books.
Don’t Civil Rights Already Exist?
So, didn’t that Mississippi burning judge miss the point? For, if Carmichael was right, if the Declaration of Independence is correct, if the 14th Amendment is still valid, Black people already had rights. This led Carmichael to call civil rights legislation incoherent to the core. For, he insisted, American society could never turn against itself:
“So that the failures to pass a civil rights bill isn’t because of Black Power, isn’t because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; it’s not because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities. It is incapability of whites to deal with their own problems inside their own communities. That is the problem of the failure of the civil rights bill.”Was Carmichael’s attitude cynical to the extreme? Obviously yes. But the real question is, do we in 2024 have a better attitude? Is there a way to move forward toward the United States of America’s ideals of freedom without ripping down the entire system, as Carmichael threatened to do? I certainly hope so, but Carmichael’s challenge has not been answered, not conclusively, even today, has it?
Do We Still Ask the Same Questions?
Is Premise #1 true? Or is it Premise #2? For it cannot be both. Do we agree with Premise #1, smugly saying that freedom is a gift, generously bestowed by the laws that benevolent rulers adopt? Or do we side with Premise #2, that we all have rights? That is the challenge that Stokely Carmichael offered in this dramatic speech.
And that, I suppose, is why Carmichael concluded his speech with two opposing prongs. He offered a prong of hope:
“We are tired of trying to explain to white people that we’re not going to hurt them.”Then, he ended with a prong of threat:
“Will white people overcome their racism and allow for that to happen in this country? If that does not happen, brothers and sisters, we have no choice but to say very clearly, ‘Move over, or we’re going to move on over you.’”So many speakers over the centuries offer simple, glib solutions to overwhelming problems. Can simple, glib solutions solve our civil rights problems? Given the Donald Trump revolution, I have my doubts. The Republican Party’s ongoing battle against what they call “woke” policies and diversity initiatives suggests ongoing negative attitudes. The Trump-era brings back the question of whether nonwhite people have rights, too.
The key problem is that, if we govern by Premise #1, the country can take away people’s rights as easily as it grants them. Is there a solution? Voters elected Donald Trump in 2016 and might elect him again in 2024. Will Trump’s voters condemn themselves for Trump’s actions? Carmichael would say that it would be impossible for Trump’s voters to condemn him, for they would have to condemn themselves.
Carmichael’s speech didn’t offer solutions. Instead, he stated stark problems in stark terms. He asked people to think. He challenged his audience. The answers to his challenge are the answers to the United States’ future.
By William D. Harpine
________________
Earlier Civil Rights Posts:
James Baldwin's 1963 Speech Ripped Away Two American Myths
Fannie Lou Hamer, "Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired," Gave a Voting Rights Speech in Narrative Style
Copyright © 2024, William D. Harpine
No comments:
Post a Comment