Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  The waitress brings the rest of the order.

  Stokely Carmichael grew up in the Bronx and Harlem, a bright, wild, aggressive boy. He attended P.S. 39, P.S. 34, and P.S. 83 and was involved, almost as soon as the family moved to New York, in fistfights and gang intrigues. In the Bronx, he was the only Negro member of the Morris Park Avenue Dukes and was, he admits, a specialist in stealing hubcaps and car radios.

  In 1956 quite suddenly Stokely broke with the past. He was admitted to the Bronx High School of Science, a school for some of the brightest children in New York. “My freshman year I wanted to leave,” Stokely recalls. “I couldn’t intellectually compete with those cats. They were doctors’ sons and lawyers’ sons and read everything from Einstein to The Grapes of Wrath. The only book I knew was Huckleberry Finn. It was clear to me I couldn’t compete. My mother wouldn’t accept it though. She wanted me to go to Science and she would have it no other way. No questions asked. ‘Remember one thing,’ she would say, ‘they’re white, they’ll make it. You won’t unless you’re on the top.’ ”

  Stokely began reading—Marx, Darwin, Camus, anything he was given. “I began to read as quickly as I could; anything that anybody mentioned. It was naïve at the time, but it was sincere.” For the first time, his friends were upper middle-class whites, wealthy kids who would go on to Harvard, Columbia, Brandeis. He began going out with white girls and making the Greenwich Village scene. He was invited to parties on Park Avenue.

  Even as he persisted in friendships with white men and women, however, Stokely realized that the white and black worlds he knew were not linking; in fact they were splitting, irrevocably, apart. “I learned at Science that white people, liberal white people, could be intellectually committed but emotionally racist. They couldn’t see through. I was everybody’s best friend. They would say to me, ‘Oh, you’re so different.’ And they didn’t know any other black people. What they meant was I didn’t meet their image of black people. And their image, their responses, are governed by the thought that Negroes are inferior. I was an exception. I was the accepted Negro. But other Negroes weren’t like me. They were bums, lazy, unambitious, inhuman, and that attitude was extended to me. They would say to me, ‘Oh, you dance so well,’ when I couldn’t dance so well. Or they would say to me, ‘Oh, you’re so sensitive.’ Well the only thing I was sensitive to was the fact that they all had maids and they saw no inconsistency between being my friend and exploiting a black maid—paying her $30 a week while they went off and made a damned good living. I went to parties on Park Avenue and they called their maids by their first name and the maids were smiling and serving and I knew full well what was going on in their minds and I knew they didn’t want to take all that shit. All these kids—these filthy rich kids—they all had maids and my mother was a maid.”

  When Stokely was a high-school senior, he began reading about the first sit-ins in the South. His first reaction was negative. “What I said was, ‘Niggers always looking to get themselves in the paper, no matter how they did it.’ My opinion was that they didn’t know what they were doing.”

  Within months, though, he met several students involved in the sit-ins. As the civil-rights movement spread quickly across the South, Stokely’s commitment—and fascination—grew. First, he picketed Woolworth’s in New York and then sat-in in Virginia and North Carolina. He turned down scholarships to several white schools and enrolled at Howard University, mostly because he could keep working in the movement while at a Negro school. At Howard, he met other civil-rights activists and immediately engaged in sit-ins and the early freedom rides through Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama. The first ride and the first arrest was in Jackson, Mississippi in 1961. . . .

  By now Stokely had finished breakfast at the airport and walked to Gate 2 to board the plane. Almost as soon as he took his seat he began shivering—he is always cold—and he grabbed a blanket off the rack. The plane started and Stokely peered through the window at the rows of A-frame houses below, the cars, the Manhattan skyline. “I went down South when I was nineteen. I was a kid who took nothing from no one. And, man, I took it.” He smiled. “In Mississippi, the beatings are by the cops, not by mobs. The mobs, they throw wild punches and if you’re cool you can miss them. But the cops are out to get your ass and you get three cops in a back room who are out to get your ass and. . . .” He shook his head. “In Jackson, before they put me in jail, the cops rode me up and down in an elevator; they kept kicking and using billy clubs and pressing the buttons using their fist. I wanted . . . I just wanted to get my hands on one of them. But like you had to cover your head and . . . and . . . you keep thinking why don’t you leave me alone. Why don’t you beat your wives instead and just leave me alone?”

  Stokely then spent time in jail. “Fifty-three days. Oh, lord, fifty-three days in a six-by-nine cell. Twice a week to shower. No books, nothing to do. They would isolate us. Maximum security. And those guards were out of sight. They did not play, they did not play. The sheriff acted like he was scared of black folks and he came up with some beautiful things. One night he opened up all the windows, put on ten big fans and an air conditioner and dropped the temperature to 38 degrees. All we had on was T-shirts and shorts. And it was so cold, so cold, all you could do was walk around for two nights and three days, your teeth chattering, going out of your mind, and it getting so cold that when you touch the bedspring you feel your skin is gonna come right off.

  “I don’t go along with this garbage that you can’t hate, you gotta love. I don’t go along with that at all. Man you can, you do hate. You don’t forget that Mississippi experience. You don’t get arrested twenty-seven times. You don’t smile at that and say love thy white brother. You don’t forget those beatings and, man, they were rough. Those mothers were out to get revenge. You don’t forget. You don’t forget those funerals. I knew Medgar Evers, I knew Willie Moore, I knew Mickey Schwerner, I knew Jonathan Daniels, I met Mrs. Liuzzo just before she was killed. You don’t forget those funerals.”

  The worst experience was what Stokely calls a two-day nervous breakdown just before the Selma-to-Montgomery march. “I was in the Ben Moore Hotel in Montgomery, getting ready to go downstairs, when they locked the doors. I couldn’t get out. And downstairs were the marchers, and the cops began beating and using hoses. I couldn’t stand it. I was by my window and I looked down and saw the cops beating and I couldn’t get out. I was completely helpless. There was no release. I kept watching and then I began screaming and I didn’t stop screaming. Some guys took me to the airport later and I kept screaming and I tried to kick in a couple of windows at the airport. Oh, man.”

  He shakes his head slowly. “There have been people in the movement who have cracked. Like you can’t help it. You always work on the assumption that the worst things will happen, you always work on the assumption that you’re going to die. I used to say that the only way they’ll stop me is if they kill me. I still think that’s true. What bothers me now is if I live through all this I just hope I don’t get tired or give up or sell out. That’s what bothers me. We all have weaknesses. I don’t know what mine are. But if they find out they’ll try to destroy me. It’s a question of them finding out what my weaknesses are—money, power, publicity, I don’t know. And sometimes . . . sometimes . . . you just get so tired too.”

  Stokely peers out the window at the clean, azure sky and shivers beneath the blanket. Within seconds, he is asleep.

  Twenty minutes later the plane is landing at Albany Airport where Stokely will catch a plane for Glens Falls. He steps down the ramp and begins singing: “The empty-handed painter on your street is drawing crazy patterns on your sheet.”

  He grins and walks into the terminal. “Man, that Dylan is a wild guy.”

  With thirty minutes free before the next plane leaves, Stokely steps into the airport luncheonette and orders a vanilla ice cream soda. The waitress leaves and Stokely turns toward several persons at the counter reading newspapers. “Look at that, look at that,” he sa
ys, laughing, pointing to the sports page headline of The New York Daily News: “Operate on Whitey’s Arm.”

  “If they flipped that over and put it on the front page they’d sell a million copies,” he laughs.

  Within the hour Stokely arrives in the small Glens Falls airport—three hours late. As soon as he climbs off the plane, a smiling, crew-cut youth waves and walks over and introduces himself. He is Frank Levy, a Ph. D. candidate in economics at Yale and a member of the camp’s staff.

  Stokely struggles into Levy’s red MG and they drive off to the camp, about fifty miles away. Stokely asks Levy about the camp and is told that it’s called the Shawnee Leadership Institute, an annual two-week summer camp for teen-agers who hold discussions on “issues” and listen to invited guest speakers. (The next day, Lord Caradon, the British Ambassador to the United Nations, was coming up.) There are about seventy campers and a staff of thirty, mostly college and graduate students.

  Stokely likes Levy and they begin kidding about Vermont: “I wonder if everyone up here smokes pot.” The car crosses New York into Vermont on Route 4 and passes Deak’s grocery and Frank’s Taxidermist. “I’ve never been to Vermont before,” says Stokely.

  The elms and pines are just starting to blaze with autumn colors and Stokely settles back and gazes silently at the countryside. He waves at farm boys—who wave back—and laughs as they ride past Crumley’s grocery in Fort Ann. “A town like this and you go out of your mind,” he exclaims. “I read someplace that suicide rates are very high in Vermont—they must be sick of cutting all that grass.”

  Just outside of Fort Ann, the car breaks down. Stokely moans and shakes his head and begins laughing. “This is my day,” he says. The fan belt is broken and Stokely and Levy struggle with the new belt. After twenty minutes they are off again.

  As soon as Stokely arrives at the camp he appears startled, then amused. “Wow,” he says, as a half-dozen teen-age interracial couples, their arms around each other, surround the car, “Hey, like I had visions when I heard the name of the camp of old Protestant ladies sitting around campfires talking about love.” They shake his hand and escort him to the dining room.

  Once inside, Stokely is greeted by an old friend, Julian Houston, who is president of the Student Government at Boston University. Stokely grins and gives Julian the “black” handshake and embraces him. “Man, you should be workin’ down in Alabama,” cries Stokely.

  With Houston and several other camp leaders, Stokely sits down at a wooden table while the campers, awestruck, watch him. Plates of ham and cheese and rolls are brought out and Stokely eats hungrily while a long-haired girl strums a guitar and sings “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.”

  After the plates are cleared away, all the campers are called into the wooden dining room. Stokely removes his shoes and begins speaking quietly.

  “Black people have not only been told that they are inferior, but the system maintains it. We are faced in this country with whether or not we want to be equal and let white people define equality for us on their terms as they’ve always done and thus lose our blackness or whether we should maintain our identity and still be equal. This is Black Power. The fight is whether black people should use their slogans without having white people say, ‘That’s okay.’ You have to deal with what white means in this country. When you say Black Power you mean the opposite of white and it forces this country to deal with its own racism. The 1954 school desegregation decision was handed down for several reasons. It was a political decision—and it was not based on humanitarianism, but was based on the fact that this country was going further into nonwhite countries and you could not espouse freedom and have second-class citizens in your own country. The area in which we move now is politics and within a political context. People kept saying that segregation and racism was wrong because it was immoral. But they still didn’t come to grips with the two essential things: we are poor and we are black. You can pass 10,000 bills but you still haven’t talked about economic security. When someone is poor, it’s not because of cultural deprivation, it’s not because they need to be uplifted and head-started. When someone is poor, it’s because they have no money, that’s all. That’s all. They say it’s our fault, our fault that we’re poor when in fact it’s the system that calculates and perpetuates poverty. They say black people don’t know money, that they’ll drink it away, they won’t work. But we never had money, and it’s presumptuous to tell us we won’t be thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. You know who the biggest welfare group is in this country? You know who they are? You think it’s the black people? Well, it’s not. It’s the farmers. They are the biggest welfare group in this country. But the difference between them and us is that they run their own programs, they control their own resources and they get something out of it. We must, we must take over and control our resources and our programs. And if we don’t, the black people will wake up again tomorrow morning, still poor, still black, and still singing We Shall Overcome.”

  The audience responds warmly and as soon as Stokely finishes, the questions begin. Stokely calls on a burly Negro youth who speaks in a thick drawl.

  “Stokely, do you believe in God?”

  Stokely stares at the youth. “That’s a personal question.”

  The youth smiles. “Oh.”

  “Where you from?” Stokely asks.

  “St. Augustine, Florida, Stokely.”

  “What you do down there?”

  “I worked in the field. Cotton, tobacco, you name it. I worked for $2 a day since I was so high. I worked for $2 a day until I heard Dr. King down there and then I knew I had to join the movement.”

  “Right.” Stokely turns from the boy to the audience. “The reason I joined the movement was not out of love. It was out of hate. I hate white supremacy and I’m out to smash it.”

  A pause. An older woman rises, a white woman. “Stokely,” she asks, a tremor in her voice, “What can we do? What can the whites do?”

  “You must seek to tear down racism. You must seek to organize poor whites. You must stop crying ‘Black supremacy’ or ‘Black nationalist’ or ‘racism in reverse’ and face certain facts: that this country is racist from top to bottom and one group is exploiting the other. You must face the fact that racism in this country is a white, not a black problem. And because of this, you, you must move into white communities to deal with the problem. We don’t need kids from Berkeley to come down to Mississippi. We don’t need white kids to come to black communities just because they want to be where the action is.

  “Look,” says Stokely, leaning forward, speaking in a loud whisper. “Every white man in this country can announce that he is our friend. Every white man can make us his token, symbol, object, what have you. Every white man can say, ‘I am your friend.’ Well from here on in we’re going to decide who is our friend. We don’t want to hear any words, we want to see what you’re going to do. The price of being the black man’s friend has gone up.

  “And you must understand,” he says, his voice rising, “that as a person oppressed because of my blackness, I have common cause with other blacks who are oppressed because of their blackness. It must be to the oppressed that I address myself, not to members—even friends—of the oppressing group.”

  The audience stirs. Stokely suggests they walk outside so he can get some good country air. Within minutes, the teen-agers sit in a semicircle beneath an evergreen, chatting quietly with Stokely who is lying on his side, his elbow dug into the grass, his chin in his hand. . . .

  By dusk, with the apricot-colored sky streaked with violet, the campers implore Stokely to stay the night. He’d love to, he says, he needs the rest and this marvelous clean air, but there are meetings and speeches and appointments the next day.

  With Julian Houston, Stokely climbs into a car driven by a Roman Catholic priest from Boston who is on the camp’s staff.

  “Stokely,” says the priest, driving quickly down the darkening road, “what should church people do?”
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  Stokely pauses. “They should start working on destroying the church and building more Christ-like communities. It’s obvious, Reverend, that the church doesn’t want Christ-like communities. Christ—he taught some revolutionary stuff, right? And the church is a counterrevolutionary force.”

  The priest drives a moment in silence. “What should the priest’s job be?”

  “To administer, through his actions, the teachings of Jesus Christ,” says Stokely. “I would also make every church a plain building that could be used for other things, a building that will not be embellished.”

  “What’s next for you, Stokely?” asks the priest.

  “Next?” Stokely smiles. “How does the victim move to equality with the executioner? That’s what’s next. We are the victims and we’ve got to move to equality with our executioners.” He pauses. “Camus never answers that question, does he? We are the victims, they are the executioners. Every real relationship is that—victim and executioner. Every relationship. Love, marriage, school, everything. This is the way this society sees love. You become a slave to somebody you love. You love me, you don’t mess around with anyone else. One is the victim, the other the executioner. . . .”

  It is dark now and chilly and Stokely begins shivering. He begins gossiping with Houston about old friends who have been lost to the poverty program, the Peace Corps, graduate schools.

  At the airport in Burlington, Stokely is told that the plane to New York has been delayed an hour. He shakes his head—“It’s my day”—and walks around with Houston. He then has two sandwiches and two glasses of milk and averts the stares of several men at the bar who recognize him.