Stokely Carmichael Quotes
The March on Washington was a middle class picnic.
The planning and management of the March on Washington of 1963 was dominated by well educated and/or very experienced leaders of Middle Class type institutions—churches, labor unions, governments, educational institutions, and even middle class entertainment. A few Black critics felt that the deep South Black Sharecroppers were not well represented, intellectually or culturally. To many this was the great genius of the March on Washington where there were a hundred million Americans prepared to find great fault with the march and what they saw was a reflection of themselves trying to protest a grievance.
Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Toure], 1942-1998, Chairman, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party Quoted in Peniel E. Joseph, Biography of Stokely Carmichael, 2014
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Hoover and the FBI were supposed to be enforcing Federal law. However, they could not find any criminal activity on the part of Martin Luther King Jr. They regarded the Civil Rights Movement as a revolutionary threat to the nation. See {620621} and {74219} . So the FBI in an incredible abuse of power, had a meeting of its top officials to plan a strategy for destroying King as a Negro leader in America. We look back on this era where officials who were never elected by anyone, and having no authority from an elected official, took it upon themselves to decide who leaders in America would be.
The March had begun in Selma with 600 marchers who were brutally beaten and harassed along the way. This brought clergy and lay people from the country over to join the protest march and when King gave the speech the marchers had swelled to 25,000.
Kennedy was initially very opposed to a civil rights march on Washington and seemed very annoyed to the Blacks in attended. But when faced with the reality of the fact that the March was going to take place and he could not prevent it, he turned around and did everything he could do to protect the marchers and enable the historic event.
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 was of course in addition to their moral position as taught by their religions.
Professor Egerton documents how successful Reconstruction was in radically changing the positions of Blacks in the South. He points out that it was so effective that a hate-filled, racist group of Southern White terrorists, with murder, arson, torture and intimidation took over many of the governments of the South while President Andrew Johnson, who although he believed in the Union, was himself an inveterate racist and opponent of emancipation, would not use the force of the Federal Government to bring the terrorists to justice. (The KKK leaders were known in every state and county). They successfully overthrew Reconstruction and set the process back by 100 years.
He was proud to be one of them. He had been an activist in CORE.
Kwame Ture was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global Pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while attending the Bronx High School of Science. He was a key leader in the development of the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), then as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and last as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).
