Black power means black dignity.
Just as surely as you are proud to be white, we're proud to be black.
Black is beautiful, baby.
It's pretty.
I always say to my brothers, I say, baby, don't worry about the white chicks.
We got everything from chalk to charcoal in our own race.
You see, black is beautiful.
Black is beautiful.
Black power means dignity.
It means we're going to walk side by side with you or through you.
We're going to be with dignity and integrity.
We don't want any more than you have, and we're not going to accept any less than you have.
That's black power.
An insight into black power from Adam Clayton Paul, Floyd McKissick, Nathan Wright, Muhammad Ali, formerly Cassius Clay, Whitney Young, Eldridge Cleaver, Dick Gregory, Martin Luther King, Alex Papalon, Alexander Allen, H.
Rap Brown, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael, some of the men who speak for black power.
We will define black power.
He will listen and recognize it.
That's all.
The existentialist philosophers talk about the execution of victim relationship that is always prevalent in most of the world today, especially the non -white world, where they're fighting for their liberation.
He says there are executioners and their victims.
The executioners are self -imposed.
The victims begin to fight and agitate for their liberation.
They use all type of means to get their liberation.
The revolutionary philosopher, Frantz Fanon, says that what happens is that the victim begins to agitate.
He uses all types of means against his executioner in fighting for a position of equality.
After he tries a number of means and they do not work, he then begins to imitate the means by which his executioner kept him down.
That is usually through force and violence.
He says, and then they begin to use it against them, breaking the one taboo that they've never been able to break, hitting back against the executioners.
So that you ought not to be upset if we are violent, the United States taught us very well how to be violent.
We're going to fight with our guns.
We're not going to fight with looting anymore.
We're going to get on the streets and we're going to woo them on the streets, in the ghetto.
That's our land and that's where we're going to stay and that's where we're going to fight.
We want to be free like the whites of this country want to be free.
We believe that black power and the future black power is the future of the United States.
Black people seek power and they must have power to change the conditions under which they live.
When you speak of a people who have been deprived, who have been gouged, who have been exploited, for all of these years I think it's a question of settling up.
We don't need anybody to tell us to stand up anymore.
Not only are we going to stand up, we're going to right the wrongs of our people in this generation.
We have to come among ourselves and find out where we are lacking.
And after we find out where we are lacking, then perhaps we can do something about correcting these conditions ourselves in our own community among our own kind.
Too long have there been two worlds, a black world and a white world, and we never understood each other.
Our language and dialogue is entirely different.
We must also realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.
Black power, according to my definition, is a very positive thing.
It means pride, it means the recognition that a group has dignity and has roots.
It means that a group has a right to participate in its destiny and to have an influence on its own community affairs, that it has a right to and should organize its economic and political strength to reward its friends and punters like every other group has done.
Though they didn't go around shouting Irish power, or Jewish power, or Italian power, they just kept their mouths shut and took over certain institutions.
Our problems as black people are vastly different than those of white people simply because we are black and because white people treat us by and large as black people.
White people do not discriminate against black people one by one.
The word black power really has frightened white America simply because when they hear black power they think of white power, and white power means napalm, tanks, state police department, high finance, overthrowing governments.
Black power do not mean this.
It might mean it in Africa where they are in control, but not in America.
All we're trying to do is take right and push wrong with it.
I believe that the so -called Negro should be allowed to defend himself from the violence of others.
And then when the Negro defends himself from the violence of others, this is not violence, this is self -defense.
When black people begin to rebel, and you'd call it riots, we understand that those are not riots, those are rebellions.
These people are rebelling because of conditions and not because of individuals.
No individual creates a rebellion.
It's created out of the conditions.
And those rebellions will continue.
And it's not a long hot summer.
That's white journalistic sensationalism.
It's no such thing as a long hot summer.
I know some places around that, you know, snow won't even touch the ground.
When we say black power, some hokey says, you mean violence, and then he expects us to say, uh -uh, boss man, oh, we don't mean violence.
Later for the hokey, later for him.
Later for him, later for him.
We will bear arms.
And we will begin to use those arms to eliminate the oppression that affects black people.
I went to St.
Louis, Missouri the other day.
They had black panthers from all over the country.
No one knew about it at all.
They had machine guns, recoilless rifles, grease guns, lugers, 25 of them, all armed.
And the chief police met me at the airport when I arrived, and they were there, right there at the steps.
They said you were violating the law.
Yeah, we're violating the law.
They said we're tired of our white and black leaders, Jackie and Martin and Bobby being killed.
We're going to protect this man while he's here.
And they didn't arrest one of them.
Because they said if you arrest one, then somebody's going to die because we are ready to kill.
America herself is a country on record as being prepared for war, even in times of peace.
And Negroes should be the same way.
They should be prepared at all times to defend their lives, their lives, their property, their children, their wives, if unjustly attacked.
That's the first power that the man has used against you.
That's the first power that's going to get him off of you.
When he knows, when he knows not that you are willing to die, not that you are willing to die, but that you are willing to kill for your freedom.
And nobody in this society ever sought to stop them when they burned our church down.
But when we retaliate, everybody is upset.
Don't you worry about it, because we're not going to take it anymore.
In Lowndes County, Alabama, last month, they burned two churches to their death.
They were black churches.
A week later, a white church was burnt to the ground.
Either we will all worship inside, or we will all worship outside.
It is completely unrealistic, as hard as those of us who try to be responsible may be.
It's unrealistic to expect us to have an all -pervasive influence and to restrain and control every black American and appeal to him to be patient.
Any more than we feel white Americans have been successful in controlling all of the extremists among white people.
It is a tragic thing that our society's results have not been tangible in the ghettos of Newark and Buffalo and the other cities around the country.
I think it's a reflection on us in the civil rights movement, shall we say, or the Urban League and the other organizations that have been active over a number of years, that our results have not been great enough to make this change.
I am a black man, and I am a responsible man.
And I want black people to be and become themselves.
You can't be discouraged, but on the other hand, neither can you be totally optimistic considering the kinds of tensions, the kinds of alienation and frustration.
When you stop and think that this bill, that they're pushing through the anti -ride bill, 98 % of the senators and the congressmen should be arrested under it, because I don't know another body of people that cross state lines and gather and create conditions that's conducive for rides than this senate and this congress.
And, you know, when you act with wisdom, you don't pass an anti -ride law, you pass a housing bill, because it's a simple act of nature, neighbors do not have rides.
The primary objective must be justice, for without justice there will not be order, and there should not be order among black people any more than there would be order among white people.
Black power is a consequence of the white backlash.
Backlash riots are consequences of the white backlash rather than a cause from it.
When you talk about law and order, the very law and order that you talk about oppresses us.
So therefore we offer the extermination of that law and order.
And you have shown us clearly that we can only do it by being armed.
I've long since passed the stage of ever blaming white people individually for race prejudice as such.
There is a certain amount of that, but our culture is fundamentally a racist culture.
And black people are discriminated against as a group by white people.
The fascination of the strongest black man that we've had here in North America, Malcolm X, to kill the brother because he had began to take meaningful steps towards gaining the freedom for his people.
He was taking steps to internationalize the black man's struggle and to take it to the United Nations, to take it diplomatically to the other countries around the world so that meaningful pressure could be brought to bear on the United States government and to force them to let his people go.
Now they felt that by murdering Malcolm X that they would also kill his ideas.
But I'm here to tell you that Malcolm X's ideas would be stronger now than they were when he was alive.
Black people all across the country are beginning to know what freedom is all about and they are beginning to express their freedoms.
And if they have to carry guns during rebellions, we will carry guns during rebellions.
And if we have to carry guns to make rebellions, we will carry guns to make those rebellions.
And the suffering forced upon us by white America justifies our demand for a complete separation in a state or a territory of our own.
The most militant black people I know are not seriously talking about a separate state or going back to Africa as much as some white people would like for them to.
There will be a lot of soul searching on the part of many white people who have tried to push black power under the rug.
You can't push a social change and a revolutionary idea under the rug.
It's here.
This is something that we got to deal with and American society will know it.
And these white folks in Washington, D .C.
can't be in a position to guide the faith and destiny of the whole world and not still realize that the number one problem that creates these problems is racism.
That until we go in and expose the racism and say that we're going to sit down and cure these problems.
But what we're trying to do is like if you come to me and I'm a doctor and I examine you and find out you have cancer and I tell you you have a headache, I've lied to you.
And you're going to die because aspirin will not cure cancer.
We say that of the total American population, the people who wheel and deal, who make the decisions, perhaps 10 % are genuine bigots.
Another 10 % are sound on this subject of race.
But we've got 80 % who are apathetic, indifferent, who are unaware, who are insensitive.
They get their impressions from what they read in the headlines.
They sometimes don't even finish the full article.
And these are the people who are going to tell the story.
These are the people who are going to swing the balance as to whether or not we meaningfully meet the needs of people in the ghetto.
And if we fail to do it, I'm afraid we're in for much more difficulty than we've had in the past.
Let us work together! Work together! Move together! Boycott together! Take it together! And by the grace of God, we're going to win together sooner than you even dream.
Music Up high, baby, up high! Up high! Up high! Up high! Up high! Music
