Documentary Excerpt Featuring Stokely Carmichael (1968)

[Music] And now my friend, we meet again. [Narrator]: Stokely Carmichael, age 27, has built a large and militant following among Black high school and college youth. Carmichael, born in Trinidad and educated at Howard University, began his political career in 1960. When he joined SNCC, the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After years of civil rights activities, Carmichael and the SNCC veterans concluded that protest changed little. Their new goal was Black Power, a phrase that frightened many moderates. Others dismissed Black Power as empty rhetoric. For Carmichael, it meant that integration into white society was neither possible nor desirable. [Carmichael]: I was told all the time that I was an exceptional Negro. I was an intelligent boy. I had scholarships to go to all the Ivy League schools. And that I could get into that society if I played by their rules. But that really bothered me because I found myself becoming less free.

See I think that the freest people in this society are the people from Mississippi. Because they have not been caught up in the structure of watching your P's and Q's. I was very worried about that. So I wanted to go south just to see how free they really were. And what the threat was to the whole power structure. I got caught up in the freedom lines and decided that Mississippi was where I'd like to stay and work. I learned from the people in Mississippi. I learned from the people in Mississippi what I never learned from the most brilliant professors I've sat under. They taught me how not to be ashamed. They taught me how to say what you want to say whenever you want to say it. [Music] Who am I? [Carmichael]: We've been so riddled and implicated with that American dream nonsense which we were never part of. I could never hope to be a part of. I think that's what the problem that America is now facing with a youth both Black and white. That we're all beginning to question why is it that she's the richest country in the world.

Is it that she exploits other countries? Is it that she steals murders and plunders? Or is it that she's so smart that she can develop her resources to yield the amount of productivity that it does. And I think that most of the youth are beginning to see that the United States has been exploiting other countries. And that we have been enjoying that good life at the expense of other countries. And that when you match that with the American dream which talks about honesty and equality and a fair share for everybody to recognize that you talked about nonsense at the expense of somebody in Vietnam or South Africa. All that in America, Asia and Japan just makes you sick to the stomach, you want to puke. When we look at all the acts of racist exploitation which this nation has committed whether in the name of manifest destiny or anti-communism we charge America with genocide. [Man]: Our next speaker is David Harris, former student body president of Stanford University.