Voices in Our Blood (59 page)

The Brilliancy of Black

Esquire,
January 1967

B
ERNARD
W
EINRAUB

Jesus Christ, His arms outstretched and pleading, is painted in lush blues and pinks in the lobby. Inside the church, the aisles are filling with teen-agers, curiously quiet and solemn, who grip programs (“Harlem Youth Unlimited presents . . . ‘The Role of Negro Youth in Shaping Their Destinies' ”). Stepping through the crowd a slight woman with a lost, desperate smile hands out a “Come Ye Disconsolate” leaflet and cries out that Brothers and Sisters you are all invited to view the Southern Baptist Stars on their twenty-second anniversary at Mount Moriah Baptist Church.

Outside, bare-chested little boys in sneakers watch the white television men set up their cameras. A white cop, a pudgy man with roly-poly fingers and a hard, blue-eyed Irish face, removes a handkerchief from his rear pocket, scrubs off his forehead sweat and gazes up, up, up at the church—a De Mille Corinthian setting that was once a movie theatre, the Alhambra. The Black Muslims are distributing
Muhammad Speaks,
and the television men are nervous and the teen-agers keep surging into the sweltering lobby past the mural of Jesus. It is dusk on Seventh Avenue and 116th Street in Harlem and it is warm and they are waiting for Stokely Carmichael.

Three months earlier, Stokely had taken over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and had coined those two words “Black Power” that aroused all the white folks and dismayed some of the powerful black folks. He had been on
Meet the Press
television and on the front page of
The New York Times
and had visited Mississippi and Washington, D.C. and Boston and now, finally, he was in Harlem.

The kids waited. They were fifteen, sixteen and seventeen, the boys in pressed olive-drab suits and seersucker jackets, the girls in sandals, dangling earrings, A-line skirts, and kerchiefs, quite chic, on their African cropped hair. They carried paperbacks and chatted quietly. For the past few months they had been in the Haryou-Act anti-poverty program where they worked with the community, and baby-sat for working mothers, and were taught what to wear when they took the A train downtown to apply for a job on Fifth Avenue. And they had read—and discussed—James Baldwin and Chester Himes and explored in heated talks The Role of Negro Youth and The Problems of Negro Youth and What's Ahead for Negro Youth. And now Stokely, who used to play stickball on 137th Street, comes onstage with a half-dozen other speakers and the curious tenseness among the teen-agers bursts. They break into wild applause.

Stokely is surrounded by friends. “Hey, baby, how ya' doin'?” he cries. . . . “Hey Thomas, why the hell aren't you back in Alabama doin' some work. . . . Hey, boy, you lookin'
good.
” Stokely looks good too. He wears black Italian boots, a tight blue suit, white shirt, striped tie, a name chain on his wrist. He is six-feet-one and has the build of a basketball guard: a solid chest, slender waist, powerful legs. His smile dazzles—an open, unguarded, innocent smile.

The first speaker is seventeen-year-old Clarissa Williams, a striking girl in a loose green dress. She has a gentle voice: “
Newsweek
and
Life
have conducted their own surveys of black people. Well, baby, no one has to tell us what the black community is like because we know it, we live it. We intend to be the generation which will make black youth to be unlimited. We intend to be the generation that says, Friends, we do not have a dream, we do
not
have a dream, we have a plan. So, TV men, do not be prepared to record our actions indoors, but be prepared to record our actions
on the streets. . . .
” The audience, and Stokely, applaud and cry, “Hit 'em hard, Sister.”

Clarissa hits them harder and by the time she winds up her tough little speech the audience is electric. And then Stokely rises. His style dazzles. He shakes his head as he begins speaking and his body appears to tremble. His voice, at least in the North, is lilting and Jamaican. His hands move effortlessly. His tone—and the audience loves it—is cool and very hip. No Martin Luther King We Shall Overcome oratory. No preacher harangue. No screaming. He speaks one tone above a whisper, but a very taut, suppressed whisper. His speech—he has made it dozens of times before—varies with the audience, the area, the news that day, his mood. Stokely's words flow musically and build and Stokely pounds into the microphone and stops and the music starts again. The audience is rapt.

“Brothers and Sisters, we have been living with The Man too long. Brothers and Sisters, we have been
in a bag
too long.
We have got to move to a position where we will be proud, be proud of our blackness.
From here on in we've got to stick together, Brothers and Sisters, we've got to join together and move to a new spirit and make of our community a community of love . . .
LOVE
. There's no time for shuckin' and jivin'. We've got to move fast and we've got to come together and we've got . . . we've got to realize . . . that this country was conceived in racism and dedicated to racism. And understand that we've got to move . . .
WE HAVE GOT TO MOVE
. . . . We've got to build to a position so that when L.B.J. says, ‘Come heah, boy, I'm gonna send you to Veetnam,' we will say, ‘Hell, no.' ” (“Preach, boy, preach. . . . Tell 'em, Stokely. . . .”)

“Brothers and Sisters, a hell of a lot of us are gonna be shot and it ain't just gonna be in South Vietnam. We've got to move to a position
in this country
where we're not afraid to say that any man who has been selling us rotten meat for high prices should have had his store bombed fifteen years ago. We have got to move to a position where we will control our
own
destiny. We have got to move to a position where we will have black people represent
us
to achieve
our
needs. This country don't run on love, Brothers, it's run on power and we ain't got none. Brothers and Sisters, don't let them separate you from other black people. Don't ever in your life apologize for your black brothers. Don't be ashamed of your culture because if you don't have culture, that means you don't exist and, Brothers and Sisters, we do exist. Don't ever, don't ever, don't
ever
be ashamed of being black because you . . . you are black, little girl with your nappy hair and your broad lips, and
you are beautiful.
Brothers and Sisters, I know this theatre we're in—it used to be the Alhambra. Well I used to come here on Saturday afternoon when I was a little boy and we used to see Tarzan here and all of us would yell like crazy when Tarzan beat up our black brothers. Well, you know Tarzan is on television now and from here on in I'm rooting for that black man to beat the hell out of Tarzan. . . .”

The audience roars and is on its feet and Stokely grins and waves. The audience keeps applauding. . . .

Stokely is in the East to build up support, to meet with S.N.C.C. workers in New York, Newark, Boston and Philadelphia. He will make speeches and hold private meetings and endure just a few interviews (he turns down many of them now because of “distortions”). At twenty-five, the most charismatic figure in the Negro movement, Stokely Carmichael rushes from ghetto to ghetto with the drive of a political candidate one week before Election Day. He sleeps just a few hours a night. He eats on the run and drinks milk to keep up his energy. In Mississippi and Alabama, during those five summers of unbearable heat, of prison, of beatings, of death threats, of rifle shots fired at him through car windows, Stokely smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. He doesn't smoke now and doesn't drink.

His base now—and S.N.C.C.'s headquarters—is in Atlanta and his itinerary in other cities is set up by the local S.N.C.C. office, mostly by twenty- and twenty-one-year-old Negroes whom Stokely led in the South. There are, inevitably, the fund-raising parties—S.N.C.C.'s funds have dropped—but mostly just meetings and speeches.

He spends the next day in Newark, a dismal, grey city which has more Negroes than whites. The highlight of the visit is a speech that evening at the anti-poverty board on Springfield Avenue, in the heart of the ghetto, and then a cocktail party at ten-fifteen across town. The anti-poverty board is packed with an older audience than in Harlem. There are mothers with children on their laps and grandmothers with grandchildren on their bosoms; old men in overalls, janitors, civil-service workers, LeRoi Jones, high-school students, tough-looking nineteen-year-olds leaning against the green stucco walls, and several white poverty workers.

Stokely instinctively knows the audience. He stares quickly across the room and then scribbles down notes on the back of an envelope. He rises to warm applause. He smiles.

“Is it okay if ah take off mah jacket?” he says in a too-Southern drawl.

The speech goes well. Stokely begins by warming up the elderly women in the audience and ends with a cry to the students. The themes are the same. “You gotta understand about white power. It's white power that brought us here in chains, it's white power that kept us here in chains and it's white power that wants to keep us here in chains. . . . What they've been able to do is make us ashamed of being black . . . ashamed. I used to come home from school and say, ‘Hey, Momma.' And she used to say, ‘Sssshh, you know how loud we are.' I wouldn't go outside eating watermelon, no sir. They say we're lazy, so we work from sunup to sundown to prove that we're not lazy. We are tired of working for them, of being the maids of the liberal white folks who consider us part of their families. . . . My mother was a maid for a lady in Long Island and this lady wanted me to go to college and she told my mother, ‘Your boy is a bright colored boy and we want to help send him to college.' Well, I hated that woman. She gave my mother $30 a week and all the old clothes her kids didn't want. Well, I didn't want her old clothes. I didn't want her to help send me to college. I wanted my Momma.” (“Tell it, Stokely. . . .”)

“There is a system in this country that locks black people in, but lets one or two get out every year. And they all say, ‘Well, look at that one or two. He's helping his race.' Well, Ralph Bunche hasn't done a damn thing for me. If he's helping his race, then he should come
home.
Brothers and Sisters, there's nothing wrong about being all white or all black. It's only when you use one to exploit the other—and we have been exploited. You gotta understand what they do. They say, ‘Let's integrate.' Well integration means going to a white school because that school is good and the black school is bad. It means moving from a black neighborhood to a white neighborhood because one neighborhood, they tell you, is bad and the other is good. Well, if integration means moving to something white, moving to something good, then integration is just a cover for white supremacy. . . .

“Brothers and Sisters, we have to view ourselves as a community and not a ghetto and that's the only way to make it. The political control of every ghetto is outside the ghetto. We want political control to be
inside
the ghetto. Like the workers in the Thirties, like the Irish in Boston, we demand the right to organize the way we want to organize. Black power is the demand to organize around the question of blackness. We are oppressed for only one reason: because we are black. We must organize. Brothers and Sisters, the only way they'll stop me from organizing is if they kill me or put me in jail. And once they put me in jail I'll organize my brothers in prison.
Organize!
”

The back of Stokely's white shirt is drenched with sweat. As soon as he finishes the speech, the crowd rises and surrounds him and shakes his hand and Stokely seeks out the old ladies who cry, “My, my,
my,
you are somethin' ” and gives the younger kids that special handshake reserved only for a black brother or sister—a handshake in which he clasps a hand with his right hand and places his left hand over the linked hands. (When a white man shakes his hand, the smile is guarded, the handclasp unsure, the left hand remains limp.)

Thirty minutes later the cocktail party on Porter Avenue awaits Stokely, who has stopped off in several Negro bars—not to drink, but to meet and talk with some of the customers. The party is given by a short, burly chemist and his wife in the yard in back of their twelve-room stucco house. At least forty people have paid $5 to see Stokely, with about a half-dozen S.N.C.C. workers admitted free. Weak Martinis and Whiskey Sours are ladled out and, curiously, the middle-aged white and Negro couples stand and drink together near the small swimming pool in the center of the yard. The younger white kids stand alone. The young Negroes stand beneath the Rose of Sharon, uncomfortable, hostile, waiting for Stokely.

He arrives late and in a bitter mood. In the car coming to the party Stokely has been told that David Frost, a candidate running in the upcoming Democratic Senatorial primary on an anti-Vietnam ticket, will also speak at the party. Stokely immediately feels that his name is being used to attract people for a political candidate, a
white
political candidate. The money isn't even going to S.N.C.C., as he had been told in New York, but to a local liberal group. Stokely is furious. He walks to the edge of the backyard and has a five-minute talk with Bob Fullilove, the local S.N.C.C. leader. Across the lawn, the young Negroes glower. . . . This is a real put-down, says one girl who is attending Rutgers Law School. Why the hell are they holding this in the backyard? Can't they hold it inside as if it were a regular,
formal
cocktail party? These people are not my kind of people . . . I don't like this scene, man. . . . This is bad news. . . .

Stokely and Fullilove end their talk and Stokely walks beneath the Rose of Sharon with the woman who accompanied him to the party, a six-foot-tall, very cool, very black-skinned woman with piled-high Nefertiti hair. She wears a tight white dress and is, she knows and Stokely knows and the entire party knows, the most stunning woman there. Stokely sips a Coke and the girl glowers at the crowd, which tries very hard to be casual, and not stare at her. A white man walks over, smiling, gripping his Martini.