JAMES BALDWIN
DEFENDS STOKELY CARMICHAEL
An article by James Baldwin, the well-known Afro-American writer, appeared in the February 14 issue of the British Guardian under the title "Black Power -in defence of Stokely Carmichael." In this piece Baldwin traces the development of the black struggle in the U.S. from the stage of nonviolent protest to its present black power stand.
"I first met Stokely Carmichael ," Baldwin writes, "in the Deep South when he was just another nonviolent kid, marching and talking and getting his head whipped. This time now seems as far behind us as the Flood, and if those suffering, gallant, betrayed boys and girls who were then using their bodies in an attempt to save a heedless nation have since concluded that the nation is not worth saving, no American alive has the right to be surprised...."
Baldwin comments bitingly on the origins of the term "black power": Carmichael "didn't coin it. He simply dug it up again from where it's been lying since the first slaves hit the gangplank.
"IT have never known a Negro in all my life who was not obsessed with Black Power. Those representatives of White Power who are not too hopelessly brainwashed or eviscerated will understand that the only way for a black man in America not to be obsessed with the problem of how to control his destiny and protect his house, his women and his children, is for that black man to become in his own mind the something less than a man which this republic, alas, has always considered him to be.
"And when a black man, whose destiny and identity have always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will control his own destiny and rejects the identity given to him by others, he is talking revolution."
The black author derided the government's attempts to persecute Stokely Carmichael for traveling without a passport, and “inciting to riot":
"He is being punished by a righteous Government, in the name of a justly wrathful people, and there appears to be a very strong feeling that this punishment is insufficient. If only, I gather, we had had the foresight to declare ourselves at war, we would now be able to shoot Mr. Carmichael for treason....
"The Government would like to be able to indict Stokely, and many others like him, of incitement to riot; but I accuse the Government of this crime. It is, briefly, an insult to my intelligence, and to the intelligence of any black person, to ask me to believe that the most powerful nation in the world is unable to do anything to make the lives of its black citizens less appalling.
"It is not unable to do it, it is only unwilling to do it. Americans are deluded if they suppose Stokely to be the first black man to say 'The United States is going to fall. I only hope I live to see the day.' Every black man in the howling North American wilderness has said it, and is saying it, in many, many ways, over and over again."
James Baldwin challenges the government's right to regulate the travel of U.S. citizens:
"And I contest the Government's right to lift the passports of those people who hold views of which the Government -~ and especially this Government -disapproves. The Government has the duty to warn me of the dangers I may encounter if I travel to hostile territory -though they never said anything about the probable results of my leaving Harlem to go downtown and never said anything about my travels to Alabama -- but it does not have the right to use my passport as a political weapon against me, as a means of bringing me to heel. These are terror tactics."
In concluding, the black writer defends the right of revolution in the United States:
"Let us attempt to face the fact that we are a racist society, racist to the very marrow, and we are fighting a racist war. No black man in chains in his own country, and watching the many deaths occurring around him every day, believes for a moment that America cares anything at all about the freedom of Asia. My own condition, as a black man in America, tells me what Americans really feel and really want, and tells me who they really are. And therefore, every bombed village is my home town.
"That, in a way, is what Stokely is saying, and that's why this youth can so terrify a nation. He's saying the bill is in, the party's over, are we going to live here like men or not? Bombs won't pay this bill, and bombs won't wipe it out. And Stokely did not begin his career with dreams of terror, but with dreams of love. Now he's saying, and he's not alone, and he's not the first, if I can't live here, well then, neither will you. You couldn't have built it without me; this land is also mine; we'll share it, or we'll perish, and I don't care."
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