(applause) And that has been the rationalization for Western civilization as it moves across the world and stealing and plundering and raping everybody in its path. I know I can live where I want to live. You need a civil rights bill, not me. [46] But the question of, why do black people, why do white people in this country associate Black Power with violence? They need that least of all. It is incapability of whites to deal with their own problems inside their own communities. If you believe in integration, you can come live in Watts. White people would have to admit that they are afraid to go into a black ghetto at night. (applause) Can he do that? How do we begin to raise them? And we’re never going to get caught up in questions about power.
It’s time that the people who are supposed to be defending their position do that.
He doesn’t know what it’s all about. So vice versa: If a black man wants to live in the slums, that should be his right. [9] I knew that I could vote and that that wasn’t a privilege; it was my right. Can they conduct it among the white people in Grenada? [38] And that that is precisely what it seems to me that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is doing. White liberals are economically secure. I know that. Get hip to that. So police brutality is going to exist on that level because of the incapability of that white man to see black people come together and to live in the conditions.
(applause)[7] Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom. And don’t deprive me of anything and say to me that you must go to college before you gain access to X, Y, and Z.
(applause) And that if the youth are going to participate in that program, how do you raise those questions where you begin to control that Peace Corps program? If that does not happen, brothers and sisters, we have no choice but to say very clearly, “Move over, or we goin’ to move on over you.” Thank you. Let them find their own psychologists. And who do it? That’s a fact. (applause)[22] Now there are several programs that we have in the South, most in poor white communities. The assumptions of this country is that if someone is poor, they are poor because of their own individual blight, or they weren’t born on the right side of town; they had too many children; they went in the army too early; or their father was a drunk, or they didn’t care about school, or they made a mistake. It is we who are the maids in the kitchens of liberal white people. I am black, therefore I am; not that I am black and I must go to college to prove myself. (applause) So the question, then, clearly is not whether or not one can work, it’s who has power? (applause)[35] And we have been unable to grasp it because we’ve always moved in the field of morality and love while people have been politically jiving with our lives. It is you who live in Cicero and stop us from living there. Every time I tried to go into a place they stopped me. Across every country in this world, while we were growing up, students were leading the major revolutions of their countries. I wouldn’t give it to anybody! And God knows we need to be leaders today, ’cause the men who run this country are sick, (applause) are sick (applause). It is something, sometimes ironic, that many of the peace groups have beginning to call us violent and say they can no longer support us, and we are in fact the most militant organization [for] peace or civil rights or human rights against the war in Vietnam in this country today.
That’s what we’re questioning, and whether or not we want this country to continue being the wealthiest country in the world at the price of raping every, everybody else across the world. There is a higher law than the law of a fool named Rusk. ‘Cause that’s all we do. It has stole everything it has, beginning with black people, beginning with black people. The first is, that, based on the fact that SNCC, through the articulation of … We must stop it. They are afraid. We chose for the emblem a black panther, a beautiful black animal which symbolizes the strength and dignity of black people, an animal that never strikes back until he’s backed so far into the wall, he’s got nothing to do but spring out. You’re fooling yourself. [14] And that runs on today, you see, because what we have today is we have what we call “modern-day Peace Corps missionaries,” and they come into our ghettos and they Head Start, Upward Lift, Bootstrap, and Upward Bound us into white society, ’cause they don’t want to face the real problem which is a man is poor for one reason and one reason only: ’cause he does not have money–period. Do you raise questions about the hundred black students who were kicked off campus a couple of weeks ago? Frederick Douglass said that the youth should fight to be leaders today.