"The savagery of white America"—an extract from Stokely Carmichael's Dialectics of Liberation speech

Stokely Carmichael

By Stokely Carmichael, 1967, Verso

We understand that a capitalist system automatically contains within itself racism, whether by design or not. Capitalism and racism seem to go hand in hand. The struggle for Black Power in the US, and certainly the world, is the struggle to free these colonies from external domination. But we do not seek merely to create communities where, in place of white rulers, black rulers control the lives of black masses, and where black money goes into a few black pockets. We want to see it go into the communal pocket. The society we seek to build among black people is not an oppressive capitalist society. Capitalism, by its very nature, cannot create structures free from exploitation.

Rescuing Fanon from the Critics

by Tony Martin, 1970

My real interest in Fanon dates from a night in August 1967 when, together with a couple hundred West Indian students in London, we converged on our Students' Center to listen to a lecture delivered by Stokely Carmichael. One or two of us in the audience had even been at primary school with him in Trinidad, though he probably didn't suspect it. "Can't you remember him?" asked an old classmate of mine, trying to jolt my memory. "He was always fighting!"