The Pitfalls of Liberalism
Kwame Ture
:)
Kwame Ture :)
This is an excerpt from the collection of essays & speeches called “Stokely Speaks” published in 1971 by Kwame Ture, a prominent thinker and organizer in the Black Power movement and a key leader of Black radical thought across America. This text focuses on the issues of liberalism and concisely illustrates the necessity of abolition instead of reform. It’s a little longer than our usual reads bit it is written in the very minimal and logical tone that Ture is well known for.
This essay by Ture brilliantly uses the example of killer cops to corner the reader into thinking critically about how and why anti-violence favors the side of the oppressor. He plainly associates this rhetoric with white liberals that feel like they are making a difference by asking the oppressed for non-violent/non-confrontational action and contrasts this fact with the assertion that the oppressor is violent all the time – leaving the reader asking “when is violence justified?” This not only relates to our past two reads, but also does an incredible job at reiterating the narrative we all experienced during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. He is an incredible thinker and unflinchingly truthful and radical in ways that make many people uncomfortable, so keep this in mind when you’re reading this text.
But wait there’s more…
I found a very very short and moving video of Kwame Ture interviewing his own mother about the conditions of his upbringing and the manufacturing of the poverty him and his family of 8 faced while living in New York City. That is also linked below.
A bit of background on our featured revolutionary:
Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, was born on 29 June 1941 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. He moved to New York when he was 11, joining his parents, who had settled there 9 years earlier. Upon graduating high school, Carmichael enrolled as a philosophy major at Howard University in 1960 and joined the university’s Nonviolent Action Group. In addition to working against segregation in Washington, D.C., Carmichael traveled south on the Freedom Rides. When the freedom riders traveled to Mississippi, Carmichael was arrested for the first time (take a look at the bonus video where his mother speaks of hearing this in the news.). Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) awarded Carmichael a scholarship designed to support arrested students, and he continued his studies at Howard. Throughout his four years in college, Carmichael participated in civil rights activities ranging from the Albany Movement to New York hospital strikes. After graduating in 1964, Carmichael joined SNCC’s staff full time, working on the Mississippi Freedom Summer project and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Carmichael found himself frustrated by what he saw as unsuccessful agitation for political rights, and grew skeptical of the prospects for interracial activism within the existing political structure.
After the Selma to Montgomery March in March 1965, Carmichael stayed in Alabama to help rural African Americans outside Selma form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an all black, independent political group that became known as the Black Panther Party. (Activists Bobby Seale and Huey Newton would later borrow the Black Panther symbol when organizing the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California in October 1966.)
Carmichael had always seen nonviolence as a tactic, rather than a guiding principle but he rose to major prominence when he became the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and openly challenged the philosophy of nonviolence and interracial alliances that had come to define the modern civil rights movement, calling instead for black radicalism. Carmichael becoming chairman of the SNCC signaled a shift in the student movement from an emphasis on nonviolence and integration toward black militancy.
One month later, Carmichael, Dr. King, and CORE’s Floyd McKissick collectively organized a march supporting James Meredith, who had been wounded by a sniper on the second day of his planned 220-mile walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. Although Carmichael and King respected one another, the two men engaged in a fierce debate over the future of the civil rights movement, black radicalism, and the potential for integration. When the march reached Greenwood, Mississippi, Carmichael was arrested for the 27th time. At a rally upon his release, he called for and coined the term “Black Power.” King disapproved of the slogan’s violent connotations, and Carmichael admitted he had used the term during the march in order to force King to take a stand on the issue. Although King initially resisted publicly opposing Carmichael and Black Power, he admitted a break between those still committed to nonviolence and those willing to use any means necessary to achieve freedom.
King and Carmichael did come to agree on public opposition to the Vietnam War. Carmichael encouraged King to speak out against the war while advisors such as Stanley Levison cautioned him that such opposition might have an adverse effect on financial contributions to SCLC.
At some point in the mid to late 1960s, the SNCC made a decision to expel whites from SNCC, a move which Carmichael opposed. Later, he joined with black nationalists in stressing racial unity over class unity as a basis for future black struggles. After resigning as SNCC chairman in 1967, Carmichael made a controversial trip to Cuba, China, North Vietnam, and finally to Guinea. Returning to the United States in 1968 with the intention of forming a black united front throughout the nation, he accepted an invitation to become prime minister of the militant Oakland-based Black Panther Party. In July 1969, three months after he moved to Africa, he made public a letter announcing his resignation from the Black Panther Party because of what he called ''its dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals.''
He changed his name to Kwame Ture and moved to Guinea, where he conferred with exiled Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah. He helped form the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party in 1972 and urged African American radicals to work for African liberation and Pan-Africanism. Carmichael died of stomach cancer in Guinea on 15 November 1998 at the age of 57.
Sources:
“The Pitfalls of Liberalism” Excerpt & Footnotes – Live text generated from Red Sail’s transcription of the excerpt. Red Sails is doing absolutely incredible work and is an extensive and highly accessible resource of radical literature online.
https://redsails.org/the-pitfalls-of-liberalism/
“Stokely Speaks” by Stokely Carmichael” full book PDF – Shout out to Mutual Aid 4 the Homies on twitter.
https://twitter.com/aid4dahomies/status/1389002992083406852
Stokely Carmichael Interviews his Mother – Huge thanks to Nunya Bezwhacks on youtube for being the only person on the internet to make this video widely available? Literally don’t have any other sources for this video other than this singular upload.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXKZdw49b3I&t=2s