1967 archival speech from Stokely Carmichael at Fountain Street Church

Editor’s note: I have been working with Fountain Street Church and looking at a substantial amount of archival materials they have. Today’s post is only possible because Fountain Street Church has provided me access to their archives and they want this information to be public and available to the community. I will be hosting the archival material on the Grand Rapids People’s History Project site, but also posting here on GRIID. This is the first in a series of posting from the archival material at Fountain Street Church.

On May 17, 1967, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Black Power advocate, Stokely Carmichael, spoke at Fountain Street Church to a standing room only crowd. Carmichael, would later change his name to Kwame Ture, gave a lecture at Fountain Street Church, which you can read in its entirely here.

A Fountain Street Church representative made some opening remarks and then introduced Carl Smith, a local Black organizer, who then introduced Carmichael/Ture. Carmichael/Ture begins speaking on page 4 of the 25 page transcript.

A reporter from the Grand Rapids Press wrote up an article about Carmichael/Ture’s speech (linked here). 

There was a second short article in the Grand Rapids Press, which acknowledged that Carmichael had meet with roughly 350 members of the black community at the First Community Church AME. People at that meeting addressed dissatisfaction with community conditions, with public education and with the Campau Housing Project in particular. Carmichael did encourage high school students from Central, South and Ottawa to get organized and become part of SNCC.

The irony was that just 2 months later, police officers in Grand Rapids pulled over and abused several young black students, which erupted into a 3 day rebellion in July of 1967. Many of the people involved in this rebellion were black high school students.

Excerpts from Kwame Ture – aka – Stokely Carmichael’s speech at Fountain Street Church on May 17, 1967.

“Now, I think that black people have to see their fight for liberation as being a fight within this country and that we have to and that we have to begin to move to understand that we have no fight in Vietnam. My enemy is not the Vietnamese. It’s the Jim Clarks, the Wallaces, the Maddox.”

“It is obvious to me that the war in Vietnam is being fought in the interest of the industrialists, in the interest of the capitalists, and in the interest of those who oppressed us. Therefore, I cannot see myself participating in a war to oppress myself.”

“If niggers get smart, you kill them, period. So they can’t indict him, because if they indicted him, they would themselves be guilty. It’s very, very important to understand because we contend in SNCC that white America cannot condemn herself for all the brutality and bestiality that she’s heaped upon black people as a total community.” 

“If you agree with that, then the logical extension would be that any civil rights bill passed in this country, while it might have eased the struggle for black people, it really helped civilized white people. And in fact, the civil rights bill was for white people, not for us.” 

“It’s the same thing with the voting rights bill. I know that I can vote. Every time I try to vote, a hunky shoots me. That’s right. So they’ve got to pass a civil rights bill for the hunky, tell him when I come to vote, get out of my way.” 

“So that what they have to do is to pass a civil rights bill to tell honkies when we move, any place we want to move, don’t go to acting and showing your color. So that if you really understand that, you would really recognize that the black power fight in this country is a fight to civilize white America because she’s uncivilized.” 

“Black power is the coming together of black people to fight for their liberation by any means necessary, period. And that’s very important because we must be able to define ourselves as we see fit because they have been defining us and we have been accepting the definitions of them, of us.” 

“And they, oh, violence don’t, what they’re saying is that violence is okay against everybody except the white man. And what really annoys me about these black people who after every rebellion, not a riot, a rebellion, jumps up and says, oh, they shouldn’t do that, they bad, they this, they that, is that they’re using them to condemn their own people and that’s the only power they have, the power to condemn black people. That’s all. They do not have the power to condemn white people because you never hear them speak out about police brutality. You never hear them speak out about white landlords who’ve been charging us high prices. They never talk about white merchants who charges high prices for rotten meat.” 

“The most violent man in the black community is a white cop. He has the license to kill and the power to do it scot-free, so it’s not a question of violence. The real question is who is controlling the violence? That is the question. If I shot 30 yellow men with slanted eyes, I would get a badge if I were in Vietnam. If I shot 30 white men who call me nigger in this country, I would get the electric chair. It’s just a question of power.” 

“Vietnamese ain’t never call me nigga. I know who I’m going to shoot. Now if we can accept those four basic premises, self-condemnation, the difference between giving one one’s freedom and denying one one’s liberation, the importance of definitions in the world today and violence, we can then move into how they’ve been pragmatically applied to us as a people to oppress and suppress us.”

“The biggest lie that white America has told about us is that we are lazy. That’s right and you have some black people running around here. Oh we so lazy. Oh we so lazy. If we were like white folk hard working we’d make it but not us. We lazy. That’s a lot of junk. White people lazy. Look here. They so lazy they went to Africa to steal us to do their work for them. That’s not a question of being lazy. We are the hardest working people in this country. Our sweat built this country scot-free. It’s not a question of whether you’re lazy or not. It is a question of who has the power to control the resources in a given area. That’s what counts. If it were true then the real lazy people in this country be people like Bobby Kennedy. He ain’t never worked in his life.” 

“Yes sir they came in there and they told us to talk about Jesus and we kept our eyes up to the sky looking and they robbed all the golden diamonds on the ground. So that if you really begin to relook at history you’d understand that the white man has been whitewashing everybody in the world and the fight today is for people to do their own thinking and recognize their own culture and not say that white people are good because they are white. What they’ve done is to force their culture on everybody around the world with their guns and their bombs, their guns and their bombs.”