Kwame Ture (Formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) on Guns, Capitalism, the Civil Rights Movement, Racism and Organization
We had more guns in the Black Panther Party chapter in New York alone than all the gangs in New York have today. I’m speaking to you facts. And yet nobody was getting shot in the African community by these guns. It is not guns that kill people, it is people that kill people. And they can kill you with poison. The problem is capitalism; the problem is a value that says you can get rich by any means necessary …
These guns that these youth have must be used to protect the community. But let me show you exactly how the guns came. You remember the 50s? If you stepped on a brother’s alligator shoe he’d cut you from ear to ear. The enemy was sure that in the 1950s he had us. I mean if you saw us in the 1950s, when brother Malcolm was speaking out there, you’d laugh. Africans use to come by and laugh at them, “oh, you talking nonsense.” Nobody paid attention. The enemy was sure he had them. But it was this same generation in the 50s that jumped up on him in the 60s.
The Chinese say: if you make a mistake, and you know it’s a mistake, and you don’t correct the mistake, you’ve made your second mistake. The enemy is not like us; they are scientific. When they make a mistake, they correct it. We are the only ones who make mistakes and continue making them. We revolutionaries, since mistakes are fatal, we are forced to correct them; we seek quickly to detect them. The enemy was surprised: “You mean that these Africans who were sleeping, and dope heads, and cutting each other in the 50s jumped up on the 60s, and these Africans who were afraid of the police jumped up and started shooting the police?! We must put a stop to this!”
We say you can make no analysis of the people if you leave out the enemy. The enemy said, “we must reduce these people to such a state that there will be so much internal chaos inside their community that once again they will beg the policeman to come back in.” It’s very simple. There’s nothing complicated about the plan at all. The enemy decided to pump in drugs, pump in guns and cut down on revolutionary talk. Let the culture talk about shaking their butts and nothing else.
But we struggles have a responsibility. In fight of heightened oppression of the enemy, we must heighten our resistance. I remember the other day a brother came and said, “Oh, hey, brother Kwame Ture, remember me? I was out there with you in the 60s! I was out there!” “So whatchu doing now?” “I ain’t doing nothing.” “You should be shot.” I speak the truth. I know how desperately we need anyone who has any experience of struggle out here today. We need them more than we did in the 60s. And the beautiful thing about today is we got a whole lot who got a whole lot of experience.
