Adam Clayton Powell lecture, "Black Power, Politics, and the Young," at Grinnell College, October 9, 1968

Speaker 1: The broadcasting service of the University of Iowa, in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at the the University, presents a series of programs on Afro-American Culture. These programs are presented as background material for the course Afro-American Literature. Today's program is an address by Adam Clayton Powell entitled Race, Poverty and Politics, 1968. This address was recorded at Grinnell College in October of 1968. Edwin Gilmour: Good evening. I'm Professor Gilmour at the Political Science Department here at Grinnell College. In the name of the college and of our Program in Practical Political Education, I'd like to welcome all of you to the 1968 Political Lectureship. Annually since 1961, this lectureship has been sponsored by the Program in Practical Political Education to bring to our campus outstanding political figures to speak to contemporary issues of domestic American politics. Edwin Gilmour: The theme for this year's lectureship focuses on two crucial domestic issues in this 1968 political campaign, namely race and poverty. And the man who will present the lecture has unique qualifications to speak to each of these issues. First, as a Black man, he can speak to the issue of race with force and feeling first hand. And his qualifications to speak to the issue of poverty are equally impressive. Edwin Gilmour: He has almost a quarter of a century of experience in the United States Congress, but more importantly, during the years when he was Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, from 1961 until 1966, there were more pieces of significant social legislation for the benefit of disadvantaged and disinherited Americans passed by his Committee and the Congress under his leadership than in any other comparable period in American history. Edwin Gilmour: I'll refresh your memory. Some of the acts passed under his leadership. The Vocational Education Act, 1963. The Manpower Training and Development act. The Vocational Rehabilitation Act. Two Higher Education Acts. And speaking of aid to disadvantaged, I think it should be noted that two of the building on our campus will either have been built or will be built under provisions of the Higher Education Facilities Act, so I think I think that, personally, we're indebted to our visitor this evening. Edwin Gilmour: Two other landmark acts that bear his, not authorship, but certainly his leadership, were the Economic Opportunity Act, and it started the whole war in poverty, and secondly, a bill that broke a logjam for 10 years, namely, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It's my personal judgment, and I hope yours, that there is no political practitioner on the American scene today who can speak with more experience, insights and authority on the theme of this lectureship, race and poverty politics, 1968. Edwin Gilmour: Think it should be noted that the political lectureship is part of a larger framework of activities which we call the Politician in Residence Program. Over a period of two days, political lecturer assumes the schedule of a typical Grinnell student. He goes to classes. He has coffee breaks in the forum. He has his meals in the college dining room. He has small group discussions. The emphasis throughout his whole schedule is on informal and in depth contacts with as many students as possible, and it is these extensive student contacts that represent the central objective of the Politician in Residence Program and represent its most lasting value. Edwin Gilmour: One final note, if I might. The chair that is being occupied on the platform here this evening by the lecturer is a Grinnell chair, meaning that it's emblazoned with a seal of the college, and more than this, there is an appropriate plaque on the chair identifying the political lecturer and the date of his campus visit. This chair will go into the conference room in Carnegie Hall, the headquarters for the Program in Practical Political Education, where it will remain to memorialize the stay of the 1968 Political Lecturer with us. Edwin Gilmour: And now I am please to present Ernest T. Westin, sophomore from Gary, Indiana, and President of the concerned Black students of Grinnell College. Mister Westin will introduce the 1968 Political Lecturer. Ernest Westin: Thank you. I am quite honored to have this opportunity to introduce a Black man whom I respect, not just because he is a political leader, but also because he is a Black man from another concentration camp called Harlem, who has not forgotten his people. Ernest Westin: In 1945, mister Adam Clayton Powell was the author of a book entitled Marching Blacks, in which he spoke of a concept he referred to as the New Negro. This concept engulfs many, including himself, who are not the house niggers that Malcolm X referred to, but are the class three Black people that Robert H. deCoy spoke of in his book, The Nigger Bible, and described as the Black man who acts and not just talks. Ernest Westin: Mister Adam Clayton Powell has passed more bills than any other Congressman in the history of Congress. Mister Adam Clayton Powell was described by President Eisenhower, speaker of the house, John McCormick, as well as President Lyndon Baines Johnson, as the best committee chairman in the history of Congress. Ernest Westin: Mister Adam Clayton Powell is one of two Americans to have received the honor of the Knight Commander of the Golden Cross, the emblem he wears tonight, which was presented to his by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. Mister Adam Clayton Powell received his Bachelor of Arts degree at Colgate University, earned his Master's degree at Columbia University, received an LLD from Virginia University and his Doctorate for Divinity from Shaw University. Ernest Westin: Mister Adam Clayton Powell is not just politician. He is also a minister, and has been for the past 39 years, the Abyssinian Baptist church in Harlem, New York. I am quite honored to introduce to you a Black man who practices what he preaches, and one who has kept the faith. I am pleased to introduce to you the Honorable Representative from the 18th district of New York, brother Adam Clayton Powell. Adam Clayton Po...: I don't know how I'm really able to stand up here and talk tonight. I think the most unjust thing that ever happened to me was, after I had been dragged out of bed at 7:45, flying from New York to Chicago on the plane one hour, tied up at New York airport and the one hour in Des Moines, and just barely getting a few hours, just come in from Los Angeles, and then I went from this building to that building, and sociology and political science. You drink more coffee here than you drink anything else. Coffee break here, coffee break there, coffee break here. Adam Clayton Po...: And then finally it was all over before the press conference, here came the committee that said to me, we're here to take you on a tour of the campus. It's been a very rewarding experience, and I am going to tell you something that Dr. Gilmour will tell you later, that I accepted his invitation to come here because I wanted to confront want I consider one of the more intellectual campuses in the nation at one-half of my usual fee, Dr. Gilmour can tell you that, and 10 times as much time as I usually spend. I usually just make a speech and questions and answers, and that's it. Adam Clayton Po...: But I've has a very rewarding experience today, and we're seeing each other face to face. I hope that we can go a bit further in our dialogue tonight. I hope that you will take out of this meeting as much as I have taken out of meeting you. Adam Clayton Po...: I'm going to divide my talk into three phases. One, I'm going to talk about Black Power. Next, I'm going to talk about politics. And last, I'm going to talk about the role of young people, Black and white, and the future of our republic. Adam Clayton Po...: An English essayist, Matthew Arnold, about 35 of 40 years, I forget. I was going to Colgate then. Must have been 40 years ago, because I'm 60 years old. He wrote: We stand between two worlds. One world is dead, and the other world has not yet been born. I think that we are standing on the threshold of that new world that's about to be born. I do not know if it's going to be a better world or not, but I do know it's going to be a new world. Adam Clayton Po...: I think that you're going to live to see it, and I hope that I will be able to live to see it too, either way, whether it's a better world or not. But the new world is here. I want to talk to you about Black Power in relation to this new world. I want to give you background of how I speak with a certain amount of conviction and knowledge concerning Black Power. Adam Clayton Po...: The author of Black Power was a Black man from Jamaica. A Kingston Jamaican name Marcus Garvey. He came to Harlem when I was 10 years old, and I literally followed him around for three years, until they framed him and sent him to prison, United States, then had an exchange with England, sent him to prison in London, and he died there of a broken heart. Marcus Garvey had the largest number of Black people ever assembled in an organization. If you take all of the so-called civil rights organizations, all of them, and take their Black memberships and put them all together, they do not equal the one million dues paying members that Marcus Garvey had in the universal Negro improvement association. Adam Clayton Po...: He taught me, I was 10 years old, and on through the three years I was exposed to him, that Black Power was not the color of your skin. Black Power was the way you thought and the way you felt. That's the beginning of Black Power. Now, as we move on through the years, this book that he has with him tonight, Marching Blacks. I don't know how you got it in your library here. The Library of Congress only has one copy. It's in the rare book collection. I wrote that 24 years ago and documented there, it's called Marching Blacks, how we had won in Harlem and how we could win in the United States. Adam Clayton Po...: As my beloved friend Martin said, just before he was assassinated, in my pulpit in Harlem, he said before some of us were born, before some of us could walk, before some of us could talk, Adam Powell, in Marching Blacks, wrote the blueprint for the Black revolution. After that book and 14 years of picketing and boycotts that I led, and we never lost a fight, I then became the first Black Councilman of the City of New York. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. He was my friend, and I was in the City Council as an Independent. Adam Clayton Po...: Then I went and fought that Black men should have a voice in Congress, because they've taken Harlem and cut Harlem into four pieces, four Congressman representing the Black people in the concentration camp of Harlem. I don't use the word ghetto, I use concentration camp. After I successfully got that bill through Albany, New York, they gave us a Black Congressman. I went to Congress. And there, I wrote I wrote first FEPC bill. Then I went on and called the first Black Power Conference four years ago. Adam Clayton Po...: Against this background of what I know, what I've done, what I've thought about, I'd like to define Black Power to you, with all due deference to other members who are advocating various forms of Black Power as [inaudible]. My friend, Stokely, I saw Friday night with his beloved wife, Miriam Makeba, in Harlem. Adam Clayton Po...: I want to define what Black Power means for me. Number one, Black Power is not anti-white. No more than I hope that [inaudible] is anti-Negro, or the federation of Italian organization's anti-Negro, or the Polish American Congress is anti-Negro. Sons of Saint Patrick is anti-Negro. We are not anti-white, but we are definitely pro-Black. We make no apology for it. We have earned, through the centuries, by virtue of our blood and our agony, the right to be proud that we are Afro-Americans, the same as Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Polish Americans, you call them what they want. So we're proud to be Black. Black is beautiful. Adam Clayton Po...: Black Power does not mean violence. But it does not mean total nonviolence. We're not going to walk around with a chip on our shoulders, but we're going to let the chips fall where they may. We're not going to let anybody, even you white men and women here tonight, we're not going to let anybody be beat for a cause in this reason without fighting back, because self-defense is an ancient American heritage. That's where the breaking point is in our thinking between nonviolence and total nonviolence. We do not believe in total nonviolence. We believe in nonviolence up to the breaking point, and from then on, baby, you better watch out. Adam Clayton Po...: My beloved Martin King came down to Bimini. He stayed there for three days. I think he had Bernard and Andy Young with him. We had a dialogue going, and he admitted that his position on nonviolence was no longer valid. When I went to Berkeley right after that, in January, and stated what he had said to me, he denied is. I'm going to read you an article that he wrote in May of 1967 in Ramparts Magazine. This is what he wrote in May of 67. Adam Clayton Po...: As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked me, Martin, what about Vietnam? They asked me if our nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems. To bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit me home. I, this is Martin Luther king, knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, my own government. Adam Clayton Po...: That's Martin Luther King, May 1967. Ramparts Magazine. So don't tell me when I talk about, I don't believe in total nonviolence, that I'm violating the concept of Martin. I'm not. I told Martin, I said, how can you practice nonviolence when Gandhi is dead and Nero didn't practice it and they're killing Muslims and Hindus every day in India and fighting Pakistan all the time? I said, that concept is not valid anymore. Adam Clayton Po...: Black Power means also Black dignity. It means we walk with our heads held high. I had a cracker in Congress call me one day, and he said, Brother Powell, whenever I talk to one of your people down on one of my plantations in Mississippi, I always look them dead in the eye. And as soon as they drop their head as I talk, then I know I've got them. We don't drop our heads anymore. We look America in the eye. As soon as America drops its head, we know we got them. Adam Clayton Po...: We're a very bitter group of people. We are very frustrated. We're tired of seeing our mothers come home at night, working substandard wages. We're tired of seeing our fathers over 40 not being able to get a job because they are not skilled for today's automated world, not trained for it. So we roll out of the concentration camps as teenagers and 20-year-olders, and we are bitter. We're mad. We're frustrated. We want you to understand this. We're tired of seeing our women, our mothers and our sisters, accept jobs that make them nothing but sub-quasi slaves, and our father not being able to work. We're tired of it. Adam Clayton Po...: We're tired of the fact that we have given our best to this country in our limited way as slaves, and still are slaves to the establishment. We're tired of the establishment. We're tired of the fact that after 300 years of slavery, we're not much better off. After 100 years of so-called freedom, we're not much better off. We're tired of this, and so we've made up our mind and we've come to a breaking point. Whether it's for good or for bad, I do not know, but we've made up our minds. We can't take it any longer, and we're not going to take it any longer. Adam Clayton Po...: We're only 10% of the population of America, but you must realize, for the first time in your life, it is a shock that must come into your white system that you're not longer a majority group in this world. You are a minority, and America is in danger of becoming a second class power, unless you respect Black Power and equate it with your power in these States. Because when you go to the United Nations and I go, the votes there are now Africa, Asia, Islands of the Seas, Central America, South America. Colored people are in charge of the United Nations today, and they are judging you and our nation on the basis of how you're treating Black people in the United States. Adam Clayton Po...: Wherever I go, whether it's white Europe, or whether it's Black Africa, or brown Asia, the first or the second question they ask me, whether they're kings or prime ministers or people on the streets, how do you expect us to follow a democracy that you practice the opposite way at home that you preach to us abroad? One Black man lynched in Mobile, Alabama last week, changes the foreign policy image of the United States before the world. There's lynching, by the way, since 1935, and they said he was lynched in a racial incident by his soul brothers. Why did they call the white ambulance in Mobile, which never carries a Black man to a hospital? Adam Clayton Po...: You're going to hear some things tonight you're not going to like. As one of the students at San Diego State said when he walked out of the Greek Amphitheater there and the press asked him, along with others, others said they liked so and so and so, but he said, this man was antagonistic. So [inaudible] came to me and said to me, he said you were antagonistic. I said, good. I made him think, then, for probably the first time in his life. Made him get out of the rut of the textbooks and the same old curriculum that you've been going through here for all of these years and all the other colleges I speak to, and I made him think. If one man walks out of here tonight, or one woman walks out of here tonight, who will think, then I will consider my journey here not in vain. Adam Clayton Po...: We believe in Black dignity. We believe in Black integrity. We believe in Black self respect. We believe in Black equality. We don't want to be any better, and we don't want to be any worse, and don't you worry about your white girls and us, because we've got everything in our Black Power structure that's beautiful form chalk to charcoal. Ain't it pretty, baby. Adam Clayton Po...: When I went to the university of Michigan, they suddenly passed a rule which, you can see the staples in it, and attached it to my contract. They said if you're going to talk on Black Power and so fourth, the speaker must not urge the audience to take action which is prohibited by the rules of the universities or which is illegal under federal or Michigan law. Advocating or urging the modification of the government of the United States is specifically prohibited. Adam Clayton Po...: So I then read them the second part of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. I said, as soon as I finish speaking here, the Chancellor and the Board of Regents ought to go over to the library and burn up the Declaration of Independence, because the second part of the Declaration of Independence... We know the first part, We hold these truths to be self evident... This is the second part, right after that. That whenever any form of government, this is Thomas Jefferson, becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them it will seem likely to affect their happiness. That's the part we don't read in the Declaration of Independence. Adam Clayton Po...: Now we come along to the second phase of our program, which I call tweedledum and tweedledee. That's the presidency. I have never seen such a bleak and dismal scene in my life. That's why, although a lot of people disagree with me, I give George Wallace credit. Because I disagree with him 100%, but at least he's got guts, and the other two, they're just going along, yes massa. Yes, indeed, you've got two white sambos running for President. Don't pay me any attention. I'm crazy. Yes, indeed. Adam Clayton Po...: Let's analyze the presidency semi-seriously. Here we have two men, one of them, of both of them, rather, believe in continuing the war in Vietnam. The other one, Hubert Humphrey whom I've known for almost a quarter of a century, and it was one of the great pioneers of liberalism in this nation. He says, yes, we go ahead with the war, but we're going to keep the war in poverty and all the domestic programs. That's a flagrant lie. It's impossible to maintain 72 billion dollar prohibition for the defense establishment and maintain the programs, such as those that even came out of my committee. Your new buildings came out of my committee. Higher education facilities act. Scholarship program. War on poverty. Manpower development training. You can't do it. They've been cut 25% already. Come January first, they'll be cut another 25%. You cannot do it. Adam Clayton Po...: I will support, as a democrat, Humphrey, if he does the following: One, and it's not too late, because Harry Truman turned the corner three wees before election, when the polls showed that Dewey had him, and beat him. One, if Humphrey cuts the umbilical cord and stands up like the man that we used to know years ago as a fighting pioneer out here in the Midwest. That's number one. He has nothing to lose. Why should he still be attached to the great white [inaudible] and the White House? Adam Clayton Po...: Number two, and I want you to reason with me, I know they're here from the extreme right, extreme left, and God help those of you who are in the middle. Number two, he's got to state now that comes January and if he's President, get out Vietnam. Get out of there. Who the hell do we think we are that we can be the cops of the world, when we can't even run a decent American society for Black and white, Jew and gentile and Protestant and Catholic? We want them to take our democracy? We can hardly stomach it ourselves here at home. Adam Clayton Po...: I was talking to a green beret, a master sergeant, the other day at the Copacabana. I hang out at the best places. He had been four years in Vietnam, getting ready to go back two more years, a professional fighting Marine. After certain questions back and forth, which I won't bore with, I say, how long will it take us to win the war? He said, a minimum of three years. A minimum, and maybe not then. That'll mean 35 thousand more of you young people down the drain, gone. Died at the age of 18 when you didn't even have the right to vote for the President of the United States. 18 years old, dying in Vietnam, and got to wait three years to be 21 to vote for the President. I say if a man is good enough to die, he's good enough to vote at 18. Adam Clayton Po...: We were just saying at dinner tonight, imagine the young people of America are now being run by two octogenarians. Avery Brundage and General Hershey. Two 80-year-olders, who can't find and can't run, telling you how to run and telling you to go fight and die. Out. Adam Clayton Po...: The next thing is, if we get out of Vietnam, because, if we even win Vietnam, then they're going to start bleeding us again in Thailand and Laos and Cambodia. It's going to go on and on. Martin called it a senseless war. Dick Gregory called it a lunacy war. If we get out, then we'll have the money that we have in the defense establishment now to beef up our domestic programs. To bring back again the war on poverty and bring back again the higher education act and bring back again scholarship and all the things that American people need, because we've got 30 million Americans, and 80% of them are white, that are still below three thousand dollars a year. I can take you from Georgia to Pennsylvania along the Appalachian way and show you one million, 500 thousand white families, not persons, families, who are making under one thousand dollars a year in this so-called great society, which I call a sick society. One thousand dollars. Adam Clayton Po...: Even McNamara, in his new book that just came out, and he was the real pro there at the pentagon, as you know, his new book just came out, and this is just one sentence from his book. I want to read it you because maybe some of you might have the reading level of some of my people in Harlem. They go to school and they come out with the reading level of three years in elementary school. This is McNamara. I just got to read it to you because it's fantastic. Just book just came out last week. It's one 176 pages. But I don't want to read all of them. Here it is. Adam Clayton Po...: He said, If Moscow and Washington spend four billion, 40 billion, 400 billion, on defense, when they've done all this, and all the lives have been lost, they'll still be back right where they were before. That's McNamara. Read it. That's the second, third point. Adam Clayton Po...: The next thing is that [inaudible] wants the support of not only the right thinking people in this nation, right thinking democrats, but I know my friend Gene McCarthy, I've talked to him. He's ready to come out. He said last night he wouldn't on TV, but he's still ready to come out. He's going to turn the corner. We want him to point out what law and order really is. Here's a conservative republican periodical, Time magazine. They have an article in here on law and order that supports statistically everything I've been saying and will say right now. Adam Clayton Po...: Law and order is not looting, burning, snatching pocket books, mugging. Law and order is this: Who's going to bring to the bar of justice the man that killed Medgar Evers. The man that shot Colonel Penn and his army [inaudible] driving along a Georgia road, going back to Washington to be deputy superintendent of school there. Who's going to bring to the bar of justice the bulldozer that took two young Jewish fellows from New York City, along with a Black Mississippian, and bulldozed them over? No one's been convicted. Who's going to bring law and order concerning the assassination of my beloved friends Jack and Martin and Bobby? Who's going to them the body of justice? That's law and order. Adam Clayton Po...: Warren Commission does not have the truth. The truth may never come out. But I do know some things. Warren commission refused to accept the testimony of Governor Connelly of Texas, riding in the car. He said there were definitely more than one shot. He ducked the first shot. Warren commission does not know that the deputy sheriff of Dallas county in Texas has 16 important items in his testimony before the Warren Commission, and they deleted them from the final report. You don't know that Jackie's testimony before the Warren Commission was deleted. Adam Clayton Po...: You don't know that doctor Moses of Bethesda Maryland Naval Hospital, where I have gone for the last 20 years, because the Congressmen go there for checkups, and I knew him, that he said he took the autopsy report of the President of the United States, and took them home and burned them in his fireplace. That night. There is no autopsy record for the murder of Jack Kennedy. Adam Clayton Po...: If anybody here tonight, just a casual person, was killed, the autopsy report would remain in the files of the police department and the hospitals for a matter of weeks, and maybe even months. But here's the President of the United States, and they burn the report from the United States Naval Medical Hospital. That's law and order. Adam Clayton Po...: Look at this one here. I've spoken from this platform that Bobby spoke from many times, the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. Bobby Kennedy, [inaudible], went down this isle, prearranged with his security guard in front of him, to shake hands with people and then go on upstairs for the reception. Right there where I've drawn the blue line, some group moved in, cut off his security and pulled him to go back out to the kitchen, which had never been arranged at at all. Only two people with him, Rafer Johnson and Rosey Greer. Security were blocked off, and they were waiting for him. Who turned him around? Who cut off his security? This is a sick society. If it could happen to them, it can happen to you, and it can happen to me. Adam Clayton Po...: Law and order are the big fat cats living in their penthouse suites at the Eden Rock and the [Doral] and the Fontainebleau on Miami Beach, which has become the number one crime [syndicate] of the United States. We're sucking the blood out of America and injecting into that bloodstream narcotics. Millions of dollars of a year. Let Humphrey stand up and say, we're going after them, as well as we're going to do our best to preserve all in the streets, but the real law and order, and Time magazine says it, fat cats and the Cosa Nostra and the mafia, with narcotics and prostitution and numbers and gambling. That's the real law and order. Adam Clayton Po...: I make no apologies at all for the law and order in the streets. I say it's wrong, but I say the law and order in the streets are the result of the Cosa Nostra mafia causing my people and my Spanish people in my district, at the age of 14 and 15, to push heroine in junior high schools and high schools, and I got 14 year olds in Harlem making 800 dollars a day as pushers for the mafia and the Cosa Nostra. That's law and order. Get rid of them, start cooling down down here. Law and order. Adam Clayton Po...: I say that if Humphrey will come out on these four points and really say this is law and order. I'm going to stand up as a man. I'm going to be the kind of man I used to be. I'm going to say get out of Vietnam, beef up our domestic program, give to Americans what Americans should have. Then I say, I'll go for him. Gene McCarthy will go for him. And it's not too late. We've got three weeks to go. And I doubt whether he'll do it. I doubt it. I guess I'll end up voting for Dick Gregory here. I was toying with the idea of getting in touch with George Wallace, and I would run for President, and he would run for vice President. But then I said, maybe he would stage a parade in Dallas, so I gave that up. Adam Clayton Po...: Now we come to the third part of our confrontation tonight. That is your role in this world that we live in. You must realize, and I know you do, because you're a sophisticated campus group, that there is happening, all over the world, a [inaudible], all over world, against the various establishments. I say the that if the young people of Czechoslovakia, in a Communist country with dictatorships, could rebel and put out their establishment, even though it might not last. Moscow has its troupes and tanks still there. But at least they showed their muscle. And if those communist young people behind the iron curtain could do what they did, then I ask you, what is the excuse for young Blacks and young whites not to put out the establishment in this country? What's your excuse? Adam Clayton Po...: You say, we can't do it. They kicked out the Chancellor at the University of California. I'm not advocating that the President be removed here, by the way. Excuse me. They kicked out Grayson Kirk at Columbia. They went to Curtis' office in Saint Louis, Missouri. The man put the resolution in to exclude me from Congress. First person in the history of the republic to be excluded, and they went in, Black and white, Republicans and Democrats, and they said, baby, your days are finished. We've got the bag of tricks you're outing. Adam Clayton Po...: Curtis resigned. He's running for senator to save face, but there's never been a Republican Senator in the history of Missouri. And then they got together, Blacks and whites, and in a district that's 37% Black, the Black and white Republicans nominated a Black Republican. The Black and white Democrats nominated a Black Democrat. Comes November, who cares? One of them's going to be Black. That's what they did. It can't be done. It's been done. You don't know the power you have. Adam Clayton Po...: One thing you do know, whether you admit it or not, you have broken with the other generation. Your parents, your priests, your preachers and your politicians. You've broken with them. And thank God you have. Because they are still going along the language of Samuel Hoffenstein. In his book called Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing, he wrote a very beautiful couplet, which I call the song of the middle class and upper class of America. Come wield or come woe, my status is quo. Adam Clayton Po...: Let me tell you something. There's nothing worse than the white middle class except the Black middle class. God deliver me from them. And God has so far, too. All over the United States, young people are realizing their power. I went to Duke University and spoke. The Chancellor didn't want me, but the Student Union said, you're going to speak here, and when I left, they invaded the Chancellor's home, no reflection on the President, please, and 250 of them had a sit in. All white. Adam Clayton Po...: Duke University. One of the Ivy League colleges of the South. And they enjoyed his cigars and drank his booze and went into the kitchen, the freezer, and ate steaks and everything and said, we're not coming out of here until you meet our demands on an involvement of Duke University in the problems of Durham, North Carolina. And they won. And the two men who were the Co-Chairmen of the Student Union happened to be Jewish fellows from New York, and I got a cable down in Bimini. We have overcome this day, your Jewish soul brothers. As it's happened. Adam Clayton Po...: I went to Florida A&M and spoke, no reflection on the President, on Sunday afternoon, and on Monday, the students struck, and on Tuesday, President Gore, good ol' Uncle Tom, closed the school down and put them out, and then about a month later, they forced them to resign. They got a new President and a new faculty, and everything is beautiful at Florida A&M, including the football team. Better than Morgan, by the way. They've done it all over the country. You have the muscle to do it. Adam Clayton Po...: I'd like to point out there's certain techniques involved. In the first place, since I've explained Black Power, I would want you to try to think, in your heart and in your mind, or maybe rethink, your position concerning Black militants. I want you to know that there are many forms of them. Many groups of them. But realize they've gone through hundreds of years of being downtrodden. They're not even second class citizens. Because when you look at the white sectionof America, they got second class citizens, like in Appalachia. The Black man, the Black woman today, is a third class citizen. And then comes the Indian as fourth class. Adam Clayton Po...: I want you, in your heart and mind, to try to understand that we're living on the verge of a new day. The old order has changed, said Tennyson, [inaudible]. The old order changeth, giving way to the new. And the new is here now. We're not asking you to love us. We're asking you to understand us, and we're going to try to understand you. This cat jumped up at... I forget what university it was, off the balcony and said, you don't like us, do you? I said, I like anybody who likes me. Another one said, you're a racist, aren't you? I said, the Kerner Commission said that we're living in a white racist society, and I ain't white. Adam Clayton Po...: We want you to understand this. We want you also to realize that we Black militants have proved that we have a willingness to die, if necessary. We have gone through the baptism of blood in Watts and Detroit and Newark and 136 cities, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated. We're proving we have a willingness to die. One of the finest things that ever happened to shock you into thinking was the way that white young people were beaten in Chicago. You saw for the first time the establishment is not just anti-Black, it's anti-young people, white or Black. Best thing that happened. Adam Clayton Po...: I am getting together a group in New York. It'll be Friday or Saturday of this week when I come back from the University of Mexico, I'll speak there tomorrow night. And I am going to try to get all the fragments of the Black militants to gather. The separatists. The Malcolm X. The Elijah Muhammad. Floyd McKissick is working with me on it. Trying to get the leaders together, the Black Panthers, and see if we can't [inaudible] unity in the Black militant section, and I believe that you, with McGovern and McCarthy and Ted Kennedy, that something can come out of a coalition there. Adam Clayton Po...: I believe that we should have a National Conference to Save America, call it something like that, of the Black militants and the white students on the campus, led by Ted Kennedy, led by Gene McCarthy, led by McGovern, led by people like Dick Gregory, led by the old [inaudible] if you will, and Floyd McKissick, let's have a nice little conference, and make this an important thing, because I do not think that this government's going to be saved unless you save it. And we got three years to build up to the next presidential campaign. That's my proposal. Adam Clayton Po...: I know it comes as a shock to tell you that we want you to follow us. Because we have demonstrated our willingness to die on the firing line. You have no leaders. You tried Leary, and he messed you up with LSD. You followed Mario with his free speech, he's gone, almost forgotten on Berkeley. They killed Jack. They killed Bobby. They castrated McCarthy. You have no leaders. Imagine that. You are 52% of the population of America under 25, and you have no leaders. Adam Clayton Po...: Walt Whitman said, come take my hand. I give you myself before my preaching and my teaching. Come take my hand. Let us stay together as long as we live. We're asking you to go with us. We are the generals. Because with or without you, as Sherwood Eddy wrote in his Pilgrimage of Ideas, in the last paragraph. With or without you, in the wrong way or in the right way, we are going to achieve the victory that belongs to us. I believe that we can stand together and vote together and fight together and worship together. That we can win together. I believe that. Adam Clayton Po...: The gaunt, brooding man that walked at midnight once said there would only be one nation that would never perish from the earth. We are government of the people, Black and white. Or the people Jew and gentile. And by the people Protestant and Catholic. Adam Clayton Po...: When I was about nine years old, my grandfather came North for the first time. My father woke me up. He took me in the bedroom where he had taken off his shirt. His upper under shirt. And he said, stand on that chair, Adam. I stood on that chair. And the letter P, that big, was burnt into his back. Master was Llewellyn Powell. He was a runaway slave, and they caught him and they branded him like they would a piece of cattle out here in the cattle range. And with this finger, I traced that letter P down his back, and I swore then, I was virtually a child, the age of nine, that I would never stop speaking out and fighting until I erased from my memory and from your conscience and the conscience of white America the fact that that letter P was burnt into the back of a man made in the image of God. Speaker 1: You have been listening to an address by Adam Clayton Powell entitled Race, Poverty and Politics, 1968. This address was recorded at Grinnell College in October of 1968. This series of programs on Afro-American Culture is presented by the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at the University as background material for the course Afro-American Literature. This has been a recorded presentation of the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa. [silence]. New Speaker: ♪ [music-Sweet Home] ♪♪