Speech beginning with quote from W.E.B.Du Bois about the Problem of the 20th Century being the Color Line, 1970 March (Doc 3 of 3)

in this country, from some of the very classrooms that we have met in.

Rev. Henry McNeill Turner, one of the earliest advocates of a return to Mother Africa, helped stir black political power her in the [illegible] period of Reconstruction following the Civil War.

But despite the glorious figures of the past, and some few shining examples in the present - some minor political power, economic affluence held by some few black people - the black people here ^{in America} - like black people everywhere - live on the edge of catastrophe daily. We in this city know - as you in your towns and cities everywhere - that all too often we exist at the pleasure of others, for their entertainment, or exist at all because we do not yet bother them enough to have them destroy us all.

Some of those people like to compare their situation with ours, and to exclaim that since they made it, why can't we?

We all know the answers. To be sure, we and they ^all came to this country as immigrants. Unlike us, however, they came as voluntary immigrants. They were not separated from their homeland at the point of a gun. They did not see child torn from mother, wife from husband. They did not have language and culture destroyed. They did not have a strange and alien religion forced upon them.

They discovered ^imported here a system of mercantile capitalism geared to their cash-box mentality, while we, used to communalism and the extended family found our very right to form families forbidden and

3

our labor, skills and intelligence stolen to fatten other peoples pocketbooks and to extend the crooked beak of the American eagle into the affairs of other people across the globe.

But we survived. We endured, we struggled, we persisted, we tried to overcome, and we are now at an important point in our history ^here.

Important because for the last several years there has been intense debate in our community - locallay, nationally and internationally - about how to continue our struggle.

That difficulty arises, I believe, because we have struggled so hard in the past for gains and benefits that fitted other people's agendas, and only marginally fitted ours.

We struggled for the rights of workingmen, as we should have, but as working men grew more affluent and powerful in this country, they closed us out. The AFL - CIO is not our friend.

We ^{joined the} struggled against the illegal rape of Vietnam by this country, as well we might, for no one except the Vietnamese suffer ^suffered from that agression as much as ^{more than} we do , but the American peace movement have ^did not returned that friendship in kind.

We struggled for a more equitable distribution of goods and services in this country, as well we might, but as Brother Howard Fuller tells us ^but our enemy is not our ^the class statue ^{system alone.}

Even the ^some environmentalists have told us that black people must sacrifice our chance at jobs and income so the air and water can be

4

cleaned up. Good government forces tell us that our chances at political sovereignty. must wait because good government dictates the dilution of our votes.

We are striving here at this Congress ^{must strive} for a unity that will not stifle the natural desires of each of us - in his ^{or her} own way - to forward the movement of black people, but will halt the kind of diviseness ^divisiveness that hinders us all.

That kind of unity, I believe, salutes the candidacies of C. B. King and Dr. John Cashin, black men running for Governer in Georgia and Alabama.

That kind of unity salutes Imamu Baraka who has demonstrated that the nationalist ethic can weild political power in the most corrupt American city.

That kind of unity salutes the brothers of the Black Topographical Center as they attempt to warn us - and I am afraid we are not listening - of the impending strangulation of our communities.

That kind of unity suggests that it is a luxury for us to debate the relative revisionism of ^{the late} Ho Chi Minh. It suggests that the supposed and alleged security of the college campus is not the proper place ^{from which} to engage in social criticism of people who seldom see any bood but the Bible from year to year. It suggests that the old dream of uniting the boys on the block with the bourgeoise dressed in black must be made a reality.

Let me close with two selections from that great African, Dr. DuBois, two statements from that masterful mind written 37 years apart, the first from the Crisis in in 1921 and the second from his message to

5

the All-African Conference in 1958. He begins:

"The growth of a body of public opinion among the peoples of Negro descent broad enough to be called Pan-Africanism is a movement belonging entirely to the 20th Century.

"Seven hundred and fifty years before Christ, the Negroes as rulers of Etheopia and conguerers of Egypt were practically supreme in the civilised world; but the character of the African continent was such that this supremacy bought ^brought no continental unity; rather, the inhabitants of the narrow Nile Valley set their faces toward the Mediterranean and Asia more than the western Sudan, the Valley of the Congo and the Atlantic."

"From that time even in ^to the rise of the Sudanese kingdoms of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries there was still no Pan-Africa; and after that the slave trade brought continental confusion.........

"As a boy I knew little of Africa save legends and some music in my family. The books which we studied in the public school had almost no information about Africa, save Egypt, which we were told was not Negroid. I heard few [illegible] great men of Negro blood, but I built up in my mind a dream of what Negroes would do in the future even though we had no past."

"For 400 years Europe and North America have built up their civilisation and comfort on theft of colored labor and the lands and materials which rightfully belong to these colonial peoples. The dominant exploiting nations are willing to yeild more to the demands of masses of men than were their fathers. But their [illegible] yeilding

takes the form of sharing the loot; not of stopping the looting. .......either capital belongs to all or is denied to all."

"Here then, my brothers, you face your great decision. Will you for temporary advantage - automobiles, refridgerators, Paris gowns - spend your income in paying interest on borrowed funds?"

...................

"This is the great dillema which faces Africans today, faces one and all. Give up individual rights for the needs of Mother Afirca; give up tribal independence for the needs of the nation."

"Awake, awake, put on thy strength, oh Zion! Reject the weakness of missionaries who teach neither love or brotherhood, but chiefly the virtues of private profit from capital, stolen from your land and labor. African, awake! Put on the ^beautiful robes of Pan-African socialism.

"You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a continent to regain. You have freedom and human dignity to attain."

-30-