SEEDS OF BLACK POWER

“Our elevation must be the result of self-efforts, and work of our own hands. No other human power can accomplish it. If we but determine it shall be so, it will be so. Let each one make the case his own, and endeavor to rival his neighbor, in honorable competition.”

– Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852)

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

 – Frederick Douglass, West Indian Emancipation Speech (1857)

“I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive.”

– Harriet Tubman to Sarah Bradford in Harriet, The Moses of Her People (1886)

“I had bought a pistol the first thing after Tom Moss was lynched, because I expected some cowardly retaliation from the lynchers. I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take one “lyncher” with me, this would even up the score a little bit.”

– Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1928)

“For this reason, the advance guard of the Negro people—the 8,000,000 people of Negro blood in the United States of America—must soon come to realize that if they are to take their just place in the van of Pan-Negroism, then their destiny is not absorption by the white Americans. That if in America it is to be proven for the first time in the modern world that not only Negroes are capable of evolving individual men like Toussaint, the Saviour, but are a nation stored with wonderful possibilities of culture, then their destiny is not a servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals.”

– W. E. B. DuBois, “On the Conservation of Races” (1896)

“It is hoped that when the time comes for American and West Indian Negroes to settle in Africa, they will realize their responsibility and their duty. It will not be to go to Africa for the purpose of exercising an over-lordship over the natives, but it shall be the purpose of the Universal Negro Improvement Association to have established in Africa that brotherly co-operation which will make the interests of the African native and the American and West Indian Negro one and the same, that is to say, we shall enter into a common partnership to build up Africa in the interests of our race.”

– Marcus Garvey, “Africa for the Africans” (1923)

“Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, “Black Power!” I believe that this slogan is destined to become one of the great political slogans of our time. Of course, only time itself can tell that …. Stokley and the advocates of Black Power stand on the shoulders of all that has gone before. To too many people here in England, and unfortunately to people in the United States too … too many people see Black Power and its advocates as some sort of portent, a sudden apparition, as some racist eruption from the depths of Black oppression and Black backwardness. It is nothing of the kind. It represents the high peak of thought on the Negro question which has been going on for over half century. That much we have to know, and that much we have to be certain other people get to know.”

– C. L. R. James, “Black Power” talk given in London (1967), reprinted in The C.L.R. Reader (1992)

“I have had about forty or fifty years of struggle, ever since a little boy on the streets of Norfolk called me a nigger. I struck him back. And then I had to learn that hitting back with my fists one individual was not enough. It takes organization. It takes dedication. It takes the willingness to stand by and do what has to be done, when it has to be done. A nice gathering like today is not enough. You have to go back and reach out to your neighbors who don’t speak to you. And you have to reach out to your friends who think they are making it good. And get them to understand that they—as well as you and I—cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism. Until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day in the year, every year until they win it.”

– Ella Baker, Puerto Rican Solidarity Day Speech (1974)

“Though racial persecution presses its crown of thorns on our brows, our faith in God must never falter. We must sustain that faith which helps us to cast off the leprosy of self-shame in our Black skins and lift us up to the glorious healing power of belief in the Excellence of Black power. We must have the faith to build mighty Black universities, Black businesses, and elect Black men as governors, mayors, and senators.”

– Adam Clayton Powell, Howard University Baccalaureate Address (1966)

“Africa is a paradox which illustrates and highlights neo-colonialism. Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s impoverishment …. The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”

– Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965)

“The present economic order governing international production, development, and exchange does not in practice ensure progress towards meeting those basic needs for all people, all over the world. The plea of the poor is a new international economic order which embraces for its objective the happiness of mankind.”

– Julius Nyerere, Speech given at Howard University: “The Plea of the Poor: New Economic Order Needed for the World Community.” (1977)

“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”

– Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)