Sunday, August 02, 2020
Sunday Reflection: Stokely Carmichael was not the anti-John Lewis
Bill Clinton has been disappointing us for a while, in fits and starts. Last week, he did something that made me really shake my head.
Clinton was one of the people who eulogized John Lewis at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. In so doing, he said this: "there were two or three years there where the movement went a little too far toward Stokely,” he said, “but in the end, John Lewis prevailed.”
It was a subtle dig at Kwame Ture, who is often known as Stokely Carmichael (he changed his name in the 1960's). Ture led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that Lewis was also a part of (he succeeded Lewis as leader in 1966), and was one of the original freedom riders.
In 1964, the Democratic Party in Mississippi did not allow black Mississipians to participate in the party, despite the fact that 40% of the state population was black. Moreover, the party worked hard to deny blacks the vote at all. The Freedom Democratic Party was founded as an alternative, but the national Democrats refused to seat the representatives of that Party at the 1964 convention, instead seating the delegates of the racist official party.
For a lot of people, including Ture, that soured them on American "democracy," which, as it was practiced in Mississippi, was not democracy at all. Given the facts, that isn't surprising, is it? Ture went on to become an important figure within the Black Panther Party.
Ture's vision was pretty clear: working within white power structures would never lead to equality; instead, blacks needed to build their own power structures to achieve parity.
It's not unfair to say that history has in some ways vindicated that view.
But going back to Clinton's statement, the problem is not just the slight to Ture. It's that Clinton viewed what gains have been made as Lewis's and not Ture's. That's a gross oversimplification, and like most oversimplifications it isn't true. To make the limited gains against racism and inequality that we have made, both visions were needed. And, more importantly in this moment, to make further gains there are going to have to be multiple voices that we hear from within the black community-- and we need to do that without dismissing any of them out of hand as being "communists" or terrorists. The truth is a rope with many threads.
