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        IN DEFENSE OF STOKLEY CARMICHAEL
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I first met Stokley Carmichael in the Deep South, when he was just another non-violent 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-to put the matter as mildly as it can possibly be put.  Actually, Americans are not at all surprised; they exhibit all the vindictiveness of the guilty; what happen to those boys and girls, and what happen to the civil rights movement, is an indictment, of America and Americans, and an enduring monument, which we will not outlive, to the breath taking cowardice of this soverign people.

    Naturally, the current in which we all were struggling threw Stokley and I together from time to time threw many people together including, finally, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.  America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of the black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show, the same dances, same music, same jokes.  One has done ( or see) the [[strikethrough]]the American?[[/strikethrough]] the show so long that one an do it in ones sleep.  So it was not in the least surprising for me to encounter (one more time) the American surprise when Stokley-as Americans allow themselves the luxury of supposing-coined the phrase, Black Power.  He didn't coin it.  He simply dug it up again from where it's been lying since the first slaves hit the gang-plank.  I have never known a Negro in all my life who was not obsessed with Black Power.  These representatives of white power who are not too hopelessly brain-washed or evisocerated will understand that the only way for a black man in America not to 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.  In point of sober fact, he cannot possibly be talking anything else,and nothing is more[[strikethrough]]??[[/strikethrough]]