Stokely Carmichael at Berkeley

While going through my aging uncle's correspondence, I found a letter sent to him the day after Stokely Carmichael's famous "Black Power" speech at Berkeley in 1966 by one of the white student organizers of the event.

The letter demonstrates clear tension between the white students and the black students at Berkeley. I found it interesting enough that I'm re-posting it here.

October 30,

Dear Phil,

Spent the last week and a half helping organize the conference on "Black Power" we had this weekend. It was quite a success. Over a dozen leaders of the Negro movement came to speak, including Stokely Carmichael; by the time Stokely spoke at the end of the day, there were 15,000 people in the Greek Theatre listening to him, and most of them got up and cheered when he told the students to say "Hell no!" to the draft. Leaders from Watts, Chicago, and New York were also there, all at the expense of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which put on the conference.

Governor Brown, who is running Behind Ronald Reagan, suggested publicly that Carmichael stay out of the state (was that a nice thing to say?); Reagan sent Carmichael a telegram telling him that his coming to Berkeley would "hurt he Negro cause", but Stokely came anyway, and all these public statements gave the conference wonderful publicity. One problem developed; the Negroes in the Bay area were resentful over the fact that a conference on Black Power, and Carmichael's first Bay area appearance was organized by an almost all-white organization, the SDS.

The Negro students' organization on the campus came out and denounced the conference and said SDS was just using the slogan Black Power for its own ends. So SDS had to apologize publicly for not Involving local Negro groups from the start In the conference; even so there was a lot of resentment among local Negroes about what SDS had done. Carmichael met with the local Negroes and made a compromise: he would appear at the conference, but would not speak about Black Power, he talked about the movement in general, America as an Imperialist power (although he doesn't use that word yet), and the draft.

The Incident of the black students coming out against the conference was revealing; they had been politically quiescent up til now, had done almost nothing politically on their own. After SDS apologized the sincere black leaders, while still critical of SDS, agreed to go ahead with the conference; but the Cal black students continued to try to stop the conference right up to the last minute, thereby aligning themselves with Governor Brown and Ronald Reagan. They were arguing that only black people should organize a conference on the subject of black power; they showed how "nationalist" a section of the black people have become, and how this nationalism can be a reactionary force, a rationalization for Inaction.

Am applying for a grant to take me to Paris and Algiers to study Algerian politics next year; I want a year overseas to see this country from the outside.

How's the graduate committee for advising undergrads in the Hist. Dept? Drop a line when you can.

Best regards,

Ted