CARMICHAEL
DISCUSSES BLACK POWER IN HAVANA PRESS CONFERENCE
On August 2, Stokely Carmichael held a press conference in Havana from which all U.S. correspondents were excluded.
However, m of Carmichael's remarks and those of two other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who went with him -- Julius Lester and George Ware -- have become available through Latin-American publications.
The August 11 issue of Marcha, the radical Uruguayan weekly, contained an article by Carlos Maria Gutierrez which reports on an interview Gutierrez held with the three SNCC members as well as the August 2 news conference.
Gutierrez asked Carmichael to define black power. "Carmichael pronounced the sentence slowly," Gutierrez writes.
"'Black power seeks to unite the American black people so that joining forces with the oppressed abroad they may wndertake the struggle against capitalsm. Carmichael then explained, "In the last analysis, if the black people are going to run their own lives, they must shake the economic structures of the country to their foundation. The colonies of the United States must be liberated, including naturally the black ghettos of the North and South...
"Politically, black power means what it has always meant for SNCC: organizing blacks to elect representatives and forcing these representatives to become spokesmen for their needs."
Carmichael noted the difference between this position and that of the "equalizers": "We don't believe in classical integration. There can be no integration before the abolition of capitalist exploitation makes people equal."
Carmichael then explained that black power meant political power. "Control of wealth is power...We want the people -- black and white -- to control the wealth of the country in a real way. And in this position, legal means, nonviolence and gradualism, are of no use to us.
"There is no sense in our going pefore white courts, with white judges and white law. That would be-playing their game. We must prepare new games. Our game is guerrilla warfare."
Carmichael strongly a.tacked the Vietnam war, both in his interview with Gutierrez and at the Havana press conference. "We will not take up arms to shoot at the people of Vietnam," he told the Marcha correspondent. "Our enemies are the whites of the United States. The people of Vietnam are our brothers in arms. Forty percent of the soldiers are blacks. That is the only good thing about Vietnam.
"The whites are teaching us how to kill there and when the blacks return from Asia, they will put this apprenticeship to use in American cities."
Ware broke in at this point and stated: "We are the majority in the big industrial cities and the whites cannot use the repressive tactics they are using in Vietnam there. They are using napalm and fragmentation bombs in Vietnam but what will they do in their own cities? The whites are cowards in general.
"Unless they want to destroy themselves, the arms they are using in Vietnam will be of no use to them in our urban guerrilla war, as we are already seeing in Newark and Detroit. There they will have to fight us man to man and we will sweep them away."
Gutierrez reports that Carmichael was asked at the news conference about support given by the U.S. Communist party to the struggle for black power.
"The Communist party," he answered, "is full of rich people who enjoy the fruits of the capitalist system and have no problems. Every time I have visited a white Communist in his home, I have been impressed by his manner of living, even including servants. When they show me an American proletarian Communist, I will believe in the American Communists.
"They themselves are trying to convince themselves that they are revolutionaries. But they are not in the street and they have good relations with the power structures. Their meetings number less than fifty persons and are made up of the white bourgeoisie. They are communists in name only."
Lester is reported to have added:
"In 1964 the Communist party supported the candidacy of Iyndon B. Johnson for the presidency. Today it supports nonviolence, it supports a negotiated peace in Vietnam.
"Any revolutionary knows that the peace question is also a moral question. at they propose for Vietnam is the same as if I were in my living room and a man came in and beat my wife and then proposed to negotiate the situation. This is the CP's position."
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THE WUHAN "KIDNAPPING" AND THE "CULTURAL REVOLUTION"
By Dick Roberts
The detention and possible harassment of two high Peking officials in Wuhan July 20 and 21 underscores the continuing inability of the Mao faction to consolidate power in China although the "