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COALITION'S THE THING     DELLUMS

you believe that corporate presidents ought to be put behind bars for polluting the air, and polluting the water, you're a "nigger" in this society. So what I'm trying to stand here and say is, since us black folks have got so much experience at being "niggers," then let's assume the leadership of all the "niggers" in the country and change America. "Nigger" power! Because when you put the black "niggers," the brown, red, yellow, and white, and the women "nigers," the young, the anti-war and the ecology "niggers" together, you don't have a microscopic minority in this country, you have the majority of America. We can turn this country around.
And we also have got to help the white silent majority under- stand that when they do an objective assessment of their misery, they'll wake up at four o'clock in the morning and say, "Hey, y'all -I'm a 'nigger,' too!"
But just when the silent majority gets on the fringe of understanding that they're over-worked, underpaid and over-taxed and their kids are fighting and dying in an insane war, what does the system respond with? If they want to talk about black people they say, "Black Panthers," "black activists," "black militants," Angela Davis, George Jackson and all those other mean, evil people! When they want to talk about the white radicals they call you Maoist, anarchist, Communist, hippies, yippies and yaps! And when they want to discredit the women's liberation struggle they say, "Well, I always have opened car doors first." It has nothing to do with the struggle for freedom.
I'm not going to take a whole lot of time to try to go into that story any longer. If you've got the basic part, you can go home and analyze it and evaluate all these politicians who are running around the country telling you they want to lead America. Most of them are too preoccupied with saving their pride, saving their ego, saving their stature and saving their job, and they're not preoccupied with saving the babies, the children and the world and that's what we need in power.
When the man called King died we all went out in ten thousand directions. Some of us said, "The movement is over." Some of us said, "The movement must take another direction." So some of us politicized, some of us organized, some of us mobilized, some of us magnified, some of us amplified, some of us suicide, some of us cried, some lied, some died, some tried. But most important, we're standing side by side, unified; unified for freedom in this country in 1972. We may not be uniform, but we're unified. Because there's a strange,
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