“Black Power”
Famous Speech Series Featuring Stokely Carmichael
Published in
29 min readFeb 6, 2023
Though he was born in Trinidad, Stokely Carmichael was more American than most born here. He fought to make it a better place. Stokely spoke truth to power, so much so that power resented him. This speech was given on October 29, 1966, at the University of California — Berkley. Stokely Carmichael originated the slogan, “Black Power!”
“Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom. No man can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves black people after they’re born, so that the only acts that white people can do is to stop denying black people their freedom; that is, they must stop denying freedom. They never give it to anyone.”
“Thank you very much.
It’s a privilege and an honor to be in the white intellectual ghetto of the West.
