Freedom Riders

"It became crystal clear that in order to combat power, one needed power. Black people would have to organize and obtain their own power base before they could begin to think of coalition with others. It is absolutely imperative that black people strive to form an independent base of political power first. When they can control their own communities—however large or small—then other groups will make overtures to them based on a wise calculation of self-interest. The blacks will have the mobilized ability to grant or withhold from coalition. Black people must set about to build those new forms of politics."

"Lowndes had one of the nation’s worst records for individual and institutional racism, a reputation for brutality that made white as well as black Alabama shiver. In this county, eighty-one percent black, the whites had ruled the entire area and subjugated black people to that rule unmercifully. [...] The history of the county shows that black people could come together to do only three things: sing, pray, dance. Any time they came together to do anything else, they were threatened or intimidated. For decades, black people had been taught to believe that voting, politics, is “white folks’ business.” And the white folks had indeed monopolized that business, by methods which ran the gamut from economic intimidation to murder."

"Lowndes was a truly totalitarian society—the epitome of the tight, insulated police state."

"What the master giveth, the master can take away."

"The act of registering to vote does several things. It marks the beginning of political modernization by broadening the base of participation. It also does something the existentialists talk about: it gives one a sense of being. The black man who goes to register is saying to the white man, “No.” He is saying: “You have said that I cannot vote. You have said that this is my place. This is where I should remain. You have contained me and I am saying ‘No’ to your containment. I am stepping out of bounds. I am saying ‘No’ to you and thereby I am creating a better life for myself. I am resisting someone who has contained me.” That is what the first act does. The black person begins to live. He begins to create his own existence when he says “No” to someone who contains him. But obviously this is not enough. Once the black man has knocked back centuries of fear, once he is willing to resist, he then must decide how best to use that vote. To listen to those whites who conspired for so many years to deny him the ballot would be a return to that previous subordinated condition. He must move independently. The development of this awareness is a job as tedious and laborious as inspiring people to register in the first place. In fact, many people who would aspire to the role of an organizer drop off simply because they do not have the energy, the stamina, to knock on doors day after day. That is why one finds many such people sitting in coffee shops talking and theorizing instead of organizing."

"The town of Tuskegee, in Macon County, Alabama, is undoubtedly one of the most significant areas in the history of the black man in this country. People throughout the world know Tuskegee as the home base of Booker T. Washington, from 1881 to his death in 1915. He founded Tuskegee Institute in 1881 and he was widely acclaimed as the leader of black people during that period. Dr. George Washington Carver, the scientist, became a second great name; his accomplishments in the Tuskegee Institute science laboratory with peanuts and sweet potatoes made him internationally known and respected at a time when most whites and many blacks knew nothing of Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, and other black intellectuals of that day."

"The black people should create rather than imitate—create new forms which are politically inclusive rather than imitate old racist forms which are politically exclusive."

"This country is known by its cities: those amazing aggregations of people and housing, offices and factories, which constitute the heart of our civilization, the nerve center of our collective being."

"The eruption in , in the spring of 1963 showed how quickly anger can develop into violence. Black people were angry about the killing of and Charles Mack Parker; the failure of federal, state and city governments to deal honestly with the problems of ghetto life. Now they read in the newspapers, saw on television and watched from the street corners themselves the police dogs and the fire hoses and the policemen beating their friends and relatives. They watched as young high-school students and women were beaten, as Martin Luther King and his co-workers were marched off to jail. The spark was ignited when a black-owned motel in Birmingham and the home of Dr. King’s brother were bombed. This incident brought hundreds of angry black people into the street throwing rocks and bottles and sniping at policemen. The echoes were far and wide."

"The core problem within the ghetto is the vicious circle created by the lack of decent housing, decent jobs and adequate education. The failure of these three fundamental institutions to work has led to alienation of the ghetto from the rest of the urban area as well as to deep political rifts between the two communities. In America we judge by American standards, and by this yardstick we find that the black man lives in incredibly inadequate housing, shabby shelters that are dangerous to mental and physical health and to life itself. [...] and highway clearance programs have forced black people more and more into congested pockets of the inner city. Since suburban zoning laws have kept out low-income housing, and the Federal Government has failed to pass open-occupancy laws, black people are forced to stay in the deteriorating ghettos. Thus crowding increases, and slum conditions worsen. [...] Here we begin to understand the pervasive, cyclic implications of institutional racism. Barred from most housing, black people are forced to live in segregated neighborhoods and with this comes de facto segregated schooling, which means poor education, which leads in turn to ill-paying jobs."

"The basic story of education in Central emerges as one of inefficiency, inferiority and mass deterioration. It is a system which typifies colonialism and the colonist’s attitude."

"There can be no doubt that in today’s world a thorough and comprehensive education is an absolute necessity. Yet it is obvious from the data that a not even minimum education is being received in most ghetto schools. White decision-makers have been running those schools with injustice, indifference and inadequacy for too long; the result has been an educationally crippled black child turned out onto the labor market equipped to do little more than stand in welfare lines to receive his miserable dole."

"The struggle for employment has had a drastic effect on the black community. It perpetuates the breakdown of the black family structure. Many men who are unable to find employment leave their homes so that their wives can qualify for Aid to Dependent Children or welfare. Children growing up in a welfare situation often leave school because of a lack of incentive or because they do not have enough food to eat or clothes to wear. They in turn go out to seek jobs but only find a more negative situation than their fathers faced. So they turn to petty crime, pushing dope, prostitution (joining the Army if possible), and the cycle continues."

"Those of us who survive must indeed be a tough people."

"This country, with its pervasive institutional racism, has itself created socially undesirable conditions; it merely perpetuates those conditions when it lays the blame on people who, through whatever means at their disposal, seek to strike out at the conditions."

"Herein lies the match that will continue to ignite the dynamite in the ghettos: the ineptness of decision-makers, the anachronistic institutions, the inability to think boldly and above all the unwillingness to innovate. [...] And when the dynamite does go off, pious pronouncements of patience should not go forth. Blame should not be placed on “outside agitators” or on “Communist influence” or on advocates of Black Power. That dynamite was placed there by white racism and it was ignited by white racist indifference and unwillingness to act justly."

"We are aware that it has become commonplace to pinpoint and describe the ills of our urban ghettos. The social, political and economic problems are so acute that even a casual observer cannot fail to see that something is wrong. While description is plentiful, however, there remains a blatant timidity about what to do to solve the problems. Neither rain nor endless “definitive,” costly reports nor stop-gap measures will even approach a solution to the explosive situation in the nation’s ghettos."

"This country cannot begin to solve the problems of the ghettos as long as it continues to hang on to outmoded structures and institutions. A political party system that seeks only to “manage conflict” and hope for the best will not be able to serve a growing body of alienated black people. An educational system which, year after year, continues to cripple hundreds of thousands of black children must be replaced by wholly new mechanisms of control and management. We must begin to think and operate in terms of entirely new and substantially different forms of expression. It is crystal clear that the initiative for such changes will have to come from the black community. We cannot expect white America to begin to move forcefully on these problems unless and until black America begins to move. This means that black people must organize themselves without regard for what is traditionally acceptable, precisely because the traditional approaches have failed. It means that black people must make demands without regard to their initial “respectability,” precisely because “respectable” demands have not been sufficient."

"If political institutions do not meet the needs of the people, if the people finally believe that those institutions do not express their own values, then those institutions must be discarded. It is wasteful and inefficient, not to mention unjust, to continue imposing old forms and ways of doing things on a people who no longer view those forms and ways as functional."

"Our basic premise is that money and jobs are not the final answer to the black man’s problems. Without in any sense denying the overwhelming reality of poverty, we must affirm that the basic goal is not “,” as some have called the anti-poverty and other federal programs, but the inclusion of black people at all levels of decision-making. We do not seek to be mere recipients from the decision-making process but participants in it. [...] It is our hope that the day may soon come when black people will reject because they have understood that these programs are geared to pacification rather than to genuine solutions. We hope that the rising level of consciousness may bring a rejection of such doles. This will strike many readers as fantastic, but they might recall that once in India, Gandhi rejected relief food shipments from England precisely because he saw them as tools of pacification."

"In dialectics, we know everything contains positive and negative attributes. Reforms can be used to advance Revolution or to forestall Revolution. Dialectics inform us that when the negative dominates the positive in reform it becomes an obstacle on the road to freedom; it must give way to Revolution."

"We say, “If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.” We must precisely state that what we repeat is not history but our errors under ever-changing material conditions. History does not repeat itself; it cannot. Nothing can. The first law of the universe is everything changes, all the time. Only those who see history as events and not as a process can make this error."

"It is only mass struggle that advances us and only when the masses advance do we advance."

"Revolutionaries do not take to the path of spilling blood easily."

"Imperialism, trying to preserve itself in the face of the oppressed masses’ anticolonial struggle, presented neocolonialism to the masses. Neocolonialism means powerless visibility. You see an African president, but the entire country is controlled by France or Belgium or England—its former colonial master."

"The U.S.A. is a settler-colony; only the indigenous people are its just owners."

"Authors make errors, history, does not!"

"One of the strategies of racism is to confuse the victims into believing all their victories should be awarded to the oppressor."

"Capitalism does not lie some of the time, it lies all of the time."

"The capitalist press simply records history, it never makes it; only the masses make history!"

"The capitalist press supports reform movements which forestall Revolution; these reform movements come to depend on the press and even tailor their activities to fit headlines. The capitalist press wants to intoxicate the masses with this reform movement. Intoxicated reform “leaders” believe that political power grows out of the lens of press cameras, and the more lenses, the more power. Just political power comes only from the organized masses."

"History is. We cannot make it otherwise."

"The universal law of human nature: Where there is oppression there is resistance, and “where oppression grows, resistance grows.”"

"The task of imperialism is to divide and rule, isolate and dominate."

"History is the unbroken march of struggle to advance humanity. Thus all struggles are connected, some more strongly than others."

"Human action is divided in relation to control into two domains, the conscious and the unconscious. History has its laws, which affect all in spite of ignorance of said laws. [...] One can fight for justice consciously or unconsciously, the laws of history dominate nonetheless. Thus the unconscious fighters’ energies are channeled in the process of history. Of course we can fight for injustice through ."

"Vietnam is clear, representing another of the tragedies of capitalism. Young men left the U.S.A., traveling 10,000 miles to a country they had never heard of before, actually believing they were sacrificing their lives to advance democracy, to advance history, when in fact they were fighting against themselves."

"Revolutionary history shows that the People do not nurse their wounds. After defeat, they begin immediately planning the next step in the forward ever march."

"Only a young man would have been able to say it ("Black Power"). And only someone who was forged in a crucible outside the United States. It is very important to remember that Stokely, like Marcus Garvey, is West Indian and therefore his relationship to the deep South and all those highways was a very different one, profoundly different one. I admire Stokely very much, but his frame of reference from his childhood was not Georgia or Harlem, it's someplace else. He had another sense of identity which allowed him to say, as Martin Luther King could not and as Malcolm X had to say in another way, that if we don't have power, we can't change anything. That's a very good, logical statement coming from the West indies, and a very powerful statement coming from the deep South…It is very important that Stokely said it but what was even more important was the convulsion in the white American breast because he really put his finger on the root of the problem. They ain't never gonna give us anything. Such people never do give. They have to be menaced into doing it. They won't set us free until we have the power to free ourselves. That was the importance of it. What one has made of it is something else, on both sides of what we call the racial fence."

"The dues that Stokely had to pay behind it were extraordinary because it really got to the heart of the American problem, which is, who owns the banks? I'll put it another way. When the kids were marching down in the South, the North was vividly in sympathy with them. We knew that if it ever got to the North, the same Northern liberals, who praised all those kids on the highway and sent down all that money, would do the same thing in New York as was being done in Birmingham. And the same thing happened, except in New York, the enemy is in the bank. When the kids sat down in the bank, the very same policemen, for the very same reasons, did the very same things. That is when the movement changed. When Martin Luther King went to Chicago, they threw eggs at him and said we don't want dreams, we want jobs. ..The importance of what Stokely said, and the importance of what's been happening in the last ten years is that people in the street from Birmingham to New York, especially their children, have learned to understand the nature of the American hoax."

"The civil rights movement's biggest drawback is that they don't have a group that pays its own way. They don't have a membership group. This is the kind of power that is needed. Malcolm X was an organizer, but Stokely Carmichael is entirely different. I don't see any building. The approach that Malcolm X used was the house meeting. He was doing those things that we know pay: being patient and just accumulating, committing people and so forth. He's gone, but his spirit continues."

"Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka and other black male leaders have righteously supported patriarchy. They have all argued that it is absolutely necessary for black men to relegate black women to a subordinate position both in the political sphere and in home life."

"As Kwame Ture often said: "We need each other. We have to have each other for our survival." Take this admonition seriously. We should use the occasion of the indictment announcement to gather and to continue to build power together. This is how we will win."

"Jan Goodman vividly remembers January 4, 1965, the day the U.S. House of Representatives was to vote on a resolution to "unseat" the Mississippi delegation. In addition to presenting the depositions, the MFDP had brought six hundred Black Mississippians to lobby on Capitol Hill. "We had one of the most beautiful demonstrations of all. A silent vigil on the day of the vote to unseat. It was led by Stokely Carmichael in his early days-this was slightly before full-blown Black Power, probably around six months. They had this very peaceful, nonviolent demonstration in the tunnels of Congress. It was really incredible to watch. When the congressmen, and they were all men, came through, they had to go through a phalanx of two lines of Black groups who were totally, totally silent. And just glaring at them. It was quite dramatic and quite terrific.""