Melissa Shen, Lincoln-Sudbury High School

and Kaylene Stevens, Framingham High School

RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS:

Where can I find information on my historical figure?

Stokely Carmichael:

Interview with Stokely Carmichael, “We Must Destroy the Capitalistic System Which Enslaves Us,” http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6461/

Paula Span, “The Undying Revolutionary: As Stokely Carmichael, He Fought for Black Power. Now Kwame Ture's Fighting For His Life,” Washington Post , Wednesday, April 8, 1998, Page D01 (Text of the article can be found at http://www.interchange.org/kwameture/washpoststory.html)

Stokely Carmichael, “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Position Paper: The Basis of Black Power,” http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SNCC_black_power.html

Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power,” (1967) found at http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/pdocs/readings.html

Clayborn Carson, ed., et. al., The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, p. 262-268, 282-286 (also check the index for other references to him, his beliefs and actions)

Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s, (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), p. 233-234, 238, 249, 269-270, 275-276, 279-280, 288, 289-290, 291, 340, 346-348.

Stokely Carmichael, “Towards Black Liberation,” Raymond D’Angelo, ed. The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and Interpretations, (McGraw-Hill/Duskin, 2001), p. 435-438.

Thurgood Marshall:

http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/hill/marshall.htm

Williams, Juan. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. New York: Times Books, 2000.

http://www.thurgoodmarshall.com/interviews/malcolm.htm

Huey Newton:

Huey Newton, “Black Panther Party’s ‘Ten Point Program’” found at
http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/pdocs/readings.html

Huey Newton, “The Founding of the Black Panther Party” and “Patrolling,” Clayborn Carson, ed., et. al.,
The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, p. 345-348 (also check the index for other references to him, his beliefs and actions)

Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s, (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), p. 351, 353, 354-356, 358, 361, 514, 517-518

Malcolm X:

New York Public Library Educational Resource Guide for Malcolm X,
http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/malcolmx/resources.html

Clayborn Carson, ed., et. al., The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, p.200-201, 248-261 (also check
the index for other references to him, his beliefs and actions)

Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Raymond D’Angelo, ed. The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and Interpretations, (McGraw-Hill/Duskin, 2001), p. 408-426.

John Lewis:

Link to an audio clip of John Lewis discussing his involvement in the Freedom Rides, http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/lewis.html

Clayborn Carson, ed., et. al., The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), p.163-165, 195-200 (also check the index for other references to him, his beliefs and actions)

Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s, (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), p. 57, 58, 76-77, 83-84, 86-87, 165-166, 206-207, 227-228, 237, 280-281.

MLK

Martin Luther King Jr. “I Have a Dream” - Address at March on Washington
August 28, 1963. Washington, D.C.

Martin Luther King. Jr. Letter From Birmingham Jail. April 16, 1963.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.

Robert Kennedy:

James Meredith:

http://www.jfklibrary.org/meredith/jm.html

Questions to consider:

Issues to be discussed:

Quotations from our historical figures:

Quotations from Malcolm X

Independence comes only by two ways – by ballots or bullets. Historically you’ll find that everyone who
gets freedom gets it through ballots or bullets. Now naturally everyone prefers ballots, and even I prefer
ballots, but I don’t discount bullets. I’m not interested in either ballots or bullets; I’m interested in freedom.

- Interview with Claude Lewis (December 1964)

We are taught by Mr. Muhammad that it is very important to improve the black man’s economy, his thrift. But to do this, we must have land of our own. The brainwashed black man can never learn to stand on his own two feet until he is on his own.

- Interview in Playboy magazine (May 1963)

I don’t see how you could call the strides being made in the field of integration rapid when you don’t have one city in this country that can honestly say it is an example of sincere integration.

- Interview with station WUST (May 1963)

Every time I hear Martin [Luther King] has a dream, I think Negro leaders have to come out of the clouds and wake up and stop dreaming and start facing reality.

- Interview with Claude Lewis (December 1964)

I think if there’s going to be a flowing of blood, it should be reciprocal. Black people shouldn’t be willing to bleed unless white people are willing to bleed. And black people shouldn’t be willing to be non-violent unless white people are going to be non-violent.

- Interview with Claude Lewis (December 1964)

Our goal is to bring about the complete independence of people of African descent, in the Western Hemisphere and here in the United States, and to bring about the freedom of these people…by any means necessary.

- Speech to his supporters (June 1964)

Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

- Malcolm X Speaks (1965)

Quotations from Huey Newton

The police have never been our protectors. Instead, they act as the military arm of our oppressors and continually brutalize us.

Our program was structured after the Black Muslim program – minus the religion. I was very impressed with Malcolm X…I think that I became disillusioned with the Muslims after Malcolm X was assassinated…I was following not Elijah Muhammad or the Muslims, but Malcolm X himself.

- Interview with Blackside Productions

We felt there was a need not for a separate nation, but for control of our dispersed communities. We wanted control of the communities where we were most numerous, and the institutions therein. At the same time, we felt that we were due, because of taxpaying, free access to and equal treatment in public facilities.

- Interview with Blackside Productions

We were trying to increase the conflict that was already happening and that was between the white racism, the police forces in the various communities, and the black communities in the country. And we felt that we would take the conflict to so high a level that some change had to come.

- Interview with Blackside Productions

I wanted to emphasize the community development aspect of the party…I thought the arms had served their purpose as far as being a catalyst to gain the enthusiasm of the community. I felt that we should turn away from the arms because too much had been made of them.

- Interview with Blackside Productions

Quotations from John Lewis

The workshops [in non-violent philosophies and strategies] became almost like an elective to students like me. It was the most important thing we were doing, We became a real group of believers.

- Interview with Blackside Productions

We identified with the blacks in Africa, and we were thrilled by what was going on [the liberation of more than 11 African countries in a one year period, from June 1960-June 1961.] Here were black people, talking of freedom and liberation and independence, thousands of miles away. We could hardly miss the lesson ourselves. They were getting their freedom, and we still didn’t have ours in what we believed was a free country. We couldn’t even get a hamburger and a Coke at the soda fountain. Maybe we were slow in realizing what this meant to us, but then things started moving together. What was happening in Africa, finally, had tremendous influence on us.

- Interview with Blackside Productions

We are now involved in…revolution…I want to know which side is the Federal Government on? The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery. The non-violent revolution is saying, “We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for hundreds of years. We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside any national structure that could and would assure us in a victory. To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we must say that, ‘Patience is a dirty and nasty word.’ We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually, we want our freedom, and we want it now.

- Original text of the speech to be delivered at the Lincoln Memorial (August 1963)

[In reference to his being replaced by Stokely Carmichael as the head of SNCC in May 1966] I made a decision that it didn’t matter what happened, I was going to continue to advocate the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence, that I believed in the interracial democracy, that I believed in black and white people working together. It was very disappointing – after going to jail forty times, being beaten on the Freedom Rides in ’61, almost facing death during the attempted march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 – to be challenged and unseated…as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee…I was going to continue to advocate the philosophy, the discipline, of nonviolence, and the sense of community, that all of us, blacks and whites, were in this boat together.

- Interview with Blackside Productions

Quotations from Thurgood Marshall

“We couldn't get anything through Congress. I remember, you can't name one bill that passed in the Roosevelt administration for Negroes. Nothing. We couldn't even get the anti-lynching bill through. So you had to go to the courts. That was the only place that was a possibility.”

-Interview with Marshall

“I don't believe he changed a goddamn thing. I believe he was a bum, hell he was a damned pimp. A convicted pimp - about as lowlife as you can get.”

-Marshall on Malcolm

“Who made Jesse Jackson? The press. Who made Martin Luther King? The press, they do it. Because it writes good, it writes well. And you know Martin Luther King didn't have a publicity person. No sir. The press did it all. The press did it all.”

-Interview with Marshall

Quotations from Stokely Carmichael

We’ve died out of proportion to numbers, and yet even today when people speak they will tell you once again about Goodman and Schwerner. Everybody forgot about Cheney. The names are recorded – Jimmy Lee Jackson, Herbert Lee – and so many many names are not even known…Of course, we’re still bitter to this day about it, because it still means that our life is not worth, even in death, the life of anybody else – that their life is still more precious.

- Interview with Blackside Productions

At this point in the struggle Negroes have no assurance – save a kind of idiot optimism and faith in a society whose history is one of racism – that if it were to become necessary, even the painfully limited gains thrown to the civil rights movement by the Congress will not be revoked as soon as a shift in political sentiments should occur…

We’ve got to talk about this thing called the serious coalition…that says that black folk and their white liberal friends can get together and overcome. We have to examine our white liberal friends…We’ve got to examine our white liberal friends who come to Mississippi and march with us, and can afford to march because our mothers, who are their maids, are taking care of their house and their children…I’m going to tell you what a white liberal is. You talking about a white college kid joining hands with a black man in the ghetto, that college kid is fighting for the right to wear a beard and smoke pot, and we fighting for our lives…That missionary comes to the ghetto one summer, and the next summer he’s in Europe, and he’s our ally. That missionary has a black mammy, and he stole our black mammy from us…You can’t form a coalition with people who are economically secure….for us to get it [economic security] is going to mean tearing down their system, and they are not willing to work for their own destruction… When I talk about Black Power, it is presumptuous for any white many to talk about it, because I’m talking to black people.

- Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America

There is a higher law than the law of government. That's the law of conscience.

Our grandfathers had to run, run, run. My generation's out of breath. We ain't running no more.

Quotations from Robert Kennedy

Those of you who are black…you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization – black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love…We have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times…What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States I not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black…

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times…It is not the end of violence. It is not the end of lawlessness. It is not the end of disorder. But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

- Speech to residents of a black neighborhood in Indianapolis 3 hours after Martin Luther King was shot (April 4, 1978)

We will not stand by or be aloof. We will move. I happen to believe that the 1954 [Supreme Court school desegregation] decision was right. But my belief does not matter. It is the law. Some of you may believe the decision was wrong. That does not matter. It is the law.

- Speech at the University of Georgia Law School (1961)

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

- Speech to South African students (1966)

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason. Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded. "Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs." … This much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul. For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors.

- Speech at the City Club of Cleveland (April 5, 1968)

For two centuries, my own country has struggled to overcome the self-imposed handicap of prejudice and discrimination based on nationality, on social class, or race -- discrimination profoundly repugnant to the theory and to the command of our Constitution…what price will we pay before we have assured full opportunity to millions of Negro Americans? In the last five years we have done more to assure equality to our Negro citizens and to help the deprived, both white and black, than in the hundred years before that time. But much, much more remains to be done … The road toward equality of freedom is not easy and great cost and danger march alongside all of us. We are committed to peaceful and non-violent change and that is important for all to understand -- though change is unsettling. Still, even in the turbulence of protest and struggle is greater hope for the future, as men learn to claim and achieve for themselves the rights formerly petitioned from others…We must recognize the full human equality of all of our people -- before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous -- although it is; not because the laws of God command it -- although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.

- Speech in honor of the Day of Affirmation at the University of Capetown, South Africa (June 6, 1966)

We passed some major bills in 1964, 1965, 1966…I think it was extremely important that we recognized the problem and began to deal with it, but I would say…quite frankly we've by no means made this very difficult problem that affects the United States disappear, and we're going to have a lot of problems including some of the disorders that have happened in the past over the period of the last 6 years, we're going to continue to have those within our own country for some years to come. We're dealing with a heritage of 150 years--we've been unjust to our minority groups, and particularly the Negroes--as well as some other groups--the Mexican-Americans, the Indians, and we've just begun to recognize it and now we're starting to deal with it. And I think we're going to have to continue to deal with it in the form of legislative action as well as personal activity on the part of all of us.

- Town Meeting of the World with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Gov. Ronald Reagan (May 1967)

Quotations from Martin Luther King

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character

-Martin Luther King Jr. “I Have a Dream” - Address at March on Washington. August 28, 1963.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth

- Martin Luther King. Jr. Letter From Birmingham Jail. April 16, 1963.

Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan.

- Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.

Quotations from James Meredith

"There are a million Negroes in Mississippi. I think they’ll take care of me."

-James Meredith 7th June 1966, after being shot on a civil rights march.

"The day for the Negro man being a coward is over."

-James Meredith 1966.

I considered myself engaged in a war from Day One. And my objective was to force the federal government - the Kennedy administration at that time - into a position where they would have to use the United States military force to enforce my rights as a citizen.

-James H. Meredith

My real service will be to make my people financially knowledgeable, if not secure.

-James H. Meredith

Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.

-James H. Meredith

Editor's Note:
For photos of many of the figures in this lesson, please see:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/profiles/index.html