Word: carmichaels
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With that declaration, Carmichael -- armed with little more than a rhetoric of outrage -- began to pursue the almost mystical notion that there is a frontier of American politics solely for Negroes, and that it is SNCC's to find. Mississippi Summer Project veterans Bob Moses and John Lewis were dismissed as revisionists. The new Howard educated policy-making core -- Carmichael, Courtland Cox, Charles Cobb, Cleveland Sellers -- focused on the words "self-determinism," "nationalism," and "black power." The newly evolving SNCC image was one of hard cool. The old tactic and credo of Ghandian pacifism was termed irrelevant...
...almost a year since SNCC elections brought its ideology of activism to the Movement's vanguard. Last May SNCC was an organization grappling with growing disillusionment by elements inside and outside the group. Carmichael's taking office solved these questions as far as SNCC was concerned: white involvement in the struggle was a sell-out; the Movement had to be black, directed exclusively by and towards black people...
Negro students from Berkeley to the University of Chicago to Harvard were attentive but not awestruck by Carmichael's appeal. Carmichael wasn't bringing most of his audiences any news. Afro-American and militant black-only groups had been in formation since 1963 when the Movement came North. James Foreman's statement last March to Harvard Afro-Americans -- "Your very presence in this American, educational institution is, by example, oppressing your black brothers and sisters . . . I'm fighting for your mind, baby, just like Whitey" -- antagonized, not inspired, Negroes who listened for a concrete program and heard only polemics...
...SNCC's home of Atlanta, and in Black Belt colleges, Carmichael has found a perplexing and almost insurmountable problem in recruiting 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week revolutionaries from the Negro middle-class. Behind Carmichael, the leadership cult is pre-occupied with presenting an image of bitter coolness. SNCC has rejected intellectualism -- the notion that Negroes must obtain certain credentials and legitimacy from education to be meaningful to the Negro community -- as bourgeois and escapist...
SNCC's sensitivity to the developing Negro activism on Northern campuses showed a still present line of communication between SNCC and students. Yet Carmichael's misreading of this unrest and his resultant inability to enlist 24-hour soldiers clearly reveals the distance between SNCC and the Negro on campus. The Harvard-Radcliffe Association of African and Afro-American Students typifies the new character of Negro activism. The Negro in AAAAS is proudly intellectual and even prouder of having reached Harvard. He is not "unmindful of the masses of black people he has left behind," as SNCC puts...