Oliver Tambo Quotes
How can it be said we should use only constitutional means in our struggle, when all resistance is illegal and we have no way to change the brutal realities of the racism regime?
Tambo, Oliver. Preparing for Power: Oliver Tambo Speaks. Compiled by Adelaide Tambo, Heinemann, 1987.
His strategy was to fill the jails of Birmingham, and asked the young people to help. The next days saw virtually all the Birmingham high school students our of school and in the streets protesting which was then against the un-Constitutional laws of Birmingham and Alabama. The students were arrested by the droves and the white authorities, believing that they were being firm against “radical lawbreakers”, fell into the trap, and became a travesty to most of the country and the rest of the world and the hundreds of jailed students beaten and assaulted raised the consciousness of whites as well as Blacks.
This speech is often referred to as the “Ballot or the Bullet” speech. It was the first time that Malcolm X used the “Ballot or the Bullet”. He was not the first African American to use the “Ballot or the Bullet” phrase. See {624102} for a use over 100 years ago. However, he was really arguing to allow Blacks to vote in the South where it was almost impossible at the time. There was no Voting Rights Act at that time and it was his actions that helped pass one shortly thereafter.
He advocated no cooperation with the British Colonial Administration which depended on Indian officials, administrators, clerks and other workers. The boycott strategy never worked in this case, but civil disobedience did. Boycott did work against the apartheid regime in South Africa a half century later however.
Oliver Reginald Kaizana Tambo, also known as O. R. Tambo, was a South African anti-apartheid politician and revolutionary who served as President of the African National Congress (ANC) from 1967 to 1991.
