Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) speaks on April 12, 1967 at Tougaloo College
Someone needs to teach former President Bill Clinton a lesson about keeping folks name out of his mouth.
During the funeral of civil rights icon John Lewis, Clinton used the occasion to say the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) lost it’s way under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael, who later changed his named to Kwame Ture, took over the leadership of SNCC before Lewis was elected to Congress in 1966. Ture later stepped down from SNCC to assume a prominent role with the Black Panther Party.
Ture was part of a movement focused on liberation opposed to methods aimed at coexistence with white institutions. Lewis concentrated on making changes through party-politics. Ture resisted the nonviolent philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr utilized by SNCC. His slogan "Black Power" became the battle cry among young people no longer amenable to nonviolent resistance.
There were different approaches in the movement for liberation.
Clinton decided to highlight those differences.
“Just three years later, he [Lewis] lost the leadership of SNCC to Stokely Carmichael because it was a pretty good job for a guy that young and come from Troy, Alabama. It must have been painful to lose, but he showed as a young man there’s some things that you just cannot do to hang on to a position because if you do, then, you won’t be who you are anymore," Clinton said. "And I say there were two of three years there, where the movement went a little too far towards Stokely, but in the end, John prevailed.”
Clinton is wrong for that. He’s wrong because it’s not the time or the place to compare Black leaders. He’s wrong because he's speaking from a place of white privilege. He’s wrong because it wasn’t a battle of good guys versus bad guys. Clinton, like so many people, many Black, studies the movement in terms of the people rather than the complexity of the challenges they faced.
Lewis and Ture were both Freedom Fighters. They witnessed white hostility from a front row seat. Lewis and Ture responded differently. For Lewis, he envisioned change via the continuation of taking all of it. For Ture, he was fed up with taking it.
Black Power.
Ture was only nineteen when he participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides. He was the youngest person arrested for participating in a protest to integrate a “white only” cafeteria in Jackson, Mississippi. Born in Trinidad, Ture became a naturalized American citizen at 13. He was the only Black member of a street gang called the Morris Park Dukes. In 1956, he passed the admissions test to a prestigious Bronx High School of Science. He lived in a predominantly Italian and Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. He grew up around, and thrived, within a community of rich white liberal elites.
“Now that I realize how phony they all were, how I hate myself for it. Being liberal was an intellectual game with these cats. They were still white, and I was black,” Ture said in discussing his high school friendships.
Clinton’s mistake is in glamorizing Lewis’s experience at the expense of demonizing Ture's work. In claiming history proves Lewis to be right, Clinton negates the views of Black people with differing cultural experiences. Ture response reflects a life of interactions with white liberals.
Ture brings a perspective that is vastly different than Lewis, Dr. King and others who participated in the Southern movement. To fully understand Black history as it relates to activism, the celebration of the life and work of heroes and sheroes needs to consider how their work relates to the experiences of the people who press the movement.
Black people living in Oakland formed the Black Panther Party in response to police brutality. Fred Hampton, Jr, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, founded the Rainbow Coalition, a multicultural political organization that included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots and the Young Lords, along with an alliances among Chicago street gangs to end infighting in pursuit of social change. Hampton, at the age of 21, was shot and killed on December 4, 1969 in his bed by a tactical unit of the Cook County State’s Attorney Office in conjunction with the Chicago Police. Clinton may view the Black Panthers a radicalized movement.
The Urban movement extended beyond the demand for voting rights, public accommodations and school desegregation.
Localized Resistance
What happened in Oakland was about Oakland. What happened in Chicago was about Chicago. Across America, there were and are communities formulating strategies based on the conditions of the people. The mistake in glamorizing Lewis above Ture is in denying and negating the significance of the work of people living with vastly different life circumstances.
Clinton is making a point to celebrate a certain type of resistance. That work fits neatly within a political agenda that needs Black votes to achieve and maintain his personal agenda. In naming the election as the primary issue for Black people, the genius of Ture, Hampton, Huey P. Newton, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver and Audre Lorde is overshadowed like background singers supporting the work of Black men positioned to benefit from their brand of resistance.
White Normativity
Clinton’s comments pits the leaders of change in opposition to one another. High priority given to those who function as participants of white normativity. Clinton defines the work of Black liberation by practices established by white people. Lewis considered a path. Ture, and others, took a different path due to their different experience. All paths are a journey toward the same desired destiny. Clinton names a desired path.
Many rejected that path.
“Our grandfathers had to run, run, run. My generation's out of breath,” Ture said. “We ain't running no more.”
To his credit, Lewis understood the complexity of Black resistance. He attended Malcolm X’s funeral.
“We saw Malcolm as paradoxical to our own philosophy, to our own methods of operating in the South,” Lewis said. “But we were willing to listen to Malcolm, because on one hand, [he] inspired us. Malcolm [...] said things in New York, in particular, in Chicago, but around the country, that maybe some people in the South, or in other parts of the country, didn't have the courage to say.”
We should pause to celebrate Lewis for his sacrifice. In telling his story, let's be careful to not diminish the contributions of others living with circumstances requiring more than a strategy of nonviolent resistance.
All bodies on deck
Poignant, clarifying and brilliant. The activism of Black and oppressed people everywhere is regularly categorized as either acceptable and safe, or dangerous, violent, and unacceptable. It is right and good to call this paternalistic white washing what it is - ill informed at best and disrespectful at worst - which given the time, audience, place, and purpose of his remarks - they were a bit of both. It is no doubt normative and comfortable to those who foolishly do not understand or accept that there are some who are oppressed and traumatized who may choose to respond to the violence committed against black bodies with similar commitment, vigor, and method. READ: We are not monolithic! For those who refer to Clinton as our first Black president, please check the record and know that he is definitely not Black and is anything but pro Black. I'm sure John Lewis would have corrected the former president had he been able to do so. He wasn't about shaming or tearing people down based on perceived difference. Shame on William Jefferson Clinton who clearly missed the point of his participation and Bravo Rev. Kenney for calling the willful blindness and ignorance out!
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