The historical and cultural context in which a text was written plays a major part in shaping that text. Not only do styles of writing change throughout different time periods, but what people write about and how they go about writing it is all based on the culture at a given point in history. This is especially true in Stokely Carmichael's "Black Power" speech. Carmichael uses slang terms that are quite obviously common during that time period such as "get hip to that" throughout his speech so that he can appeal to his audience of young college students. He also references the Peace Movement a few times which is another movement that was taking place during this time period. While first reading Stokely Carmichael's "Black Power" speech I did not fully understand everything that he talked about, but after researching the speech itself, as well as other speeches that were given during the time period, I began to understand and interpret the speech much better than I was before. This just goes to show how research can give a whole new interpretation of a text.  

Stokely Carmichael delivered his famous and influential "Black Power" speech on October 29, 1966 to a crowd of college students at the University of California, Berkeley. To put things in perspective, 1966 was towards the end of the Civil Rights movement. The voting rights act was passed by Congress in 1965, and it greatly increased the number of southern blacks able to register to vote, but it was also one of the last major protests of the 1960's to receive substantial support from white people. What this means to Carmichael's speech is that the "Black Power" movement wasn't getting a whole lot of support from white people. Meanwhile, the audience that Carmichael gave his speech to was primarily made up of white college students. When I first read this speech, I did not know much about any of this, I did not realize how much of an affect these things had on Carmichael's speech. After researching I was able to read the speech from a whole new perspective and interpret it in a different way.

Carmichael's speech is one of many speeches given during the civil rights movement to empower people of color. The purpose of his speech was to explain the concept of "Black Power" to a crowd of primarily white people. In his speech he explains Black Power as being a "psychological struggle". He notes that every time a black person tries to do something for themselves, a white person is always there to show them "how to do it", which only adds to their feelings of inequality and inferiority. He goes on to say that in order to eliminate those feelings of inequality and inferiority for the next generation, "black people need to be seen in positions of power, doing and articulating for themselves, for themselves.". Throughout the speech Carmichael says several things of this sort, further articulating the point of "Black Power", that blacks wanted to lead the fight for their rights, rather than following white civil rights organizers. Before I did any research, I could not have been able to tell what the purpose of Carmichael giving this speech was. Now that I have done research and understand who he was giving the speech to, and why, I now have a whole different interpretation on the speech and what its purpose was.

Often times people like to compare Stokely Carmichael to other civil rights leaders such as Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Junior. Comparisons are drawn to Malcolm X because Carmichael sort of dismisses the idea of the integration of white and black people; in his speech he refers to it as an "insidious subterfuge" put in place in order maintain white supremacy. But he is not quite like Malcolm X because he is not quite as radical or violent as Malcom X. He is not quite like Martin Luther King Junior either, considering he doesn't necessarily want integration, but he is like MLK in that he wants more rights for colored people and does not think that bloodshed is necessary to get that. Carmichael falls somewhat in the middle of these two civil rights leaders. Although Carmichael did not necessarily want white people to be a part of the "Black Power" movement, he still spoke to white crowds in order to inform them as well as getting them to stand up against other common enemies such as poverty, racism, and the greed of the ruling class of America. Knowing what king of civil rights leader Carmichael was and why he spoke to certain groups of people gave me a whole new perspective on his speech and allowed me to interpret it in a different way. 

Knowing a little bit of the background of Carmichael's life before and after the time of giving this speech also helped me to better understand it. Stokely Carmichael was born on June 29, 1941, in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. His parents immigrated to the United States when he was only a toddler, leaving him in the car of his grandmother until he could Finally come to the United States at the age of eleven. He became an American citizen at the age of thirteen and his family moved to a predominately Italian and Jewish neighborhood where he became the only black member of a street gang called the Morris Park Dukes. In 1956 he got into the Bronx High School of Science, where he was introduced to the white liberal elite. He was popular among his classmates and even attended parties and dated white girls. He then chose to go to the historically black Howard University in DC where he studied philosophy. This is where he first started to get involved with the civil rights movement. At this stage in his life, Carmichael adhered to Martin Luther King's non-violent philosophy. However, as time went on he became frustrated with the slow progress and having to endure repeated acts of humiliation and violence at the hands of white police officers. This is about the time he started the "Black Power" movement. In 1967, he joined the Black Panthers, and in 1969 he left them in order to take up permanent residency in Conakry, Guinea, where he dedicated his life to pan-African unity. He claimed that America "did not belong to the blacks", and he changed his named to Kwame Ture in order to honor the presidents or Ghana and Guinea. Guinea is where he spent the remainder of his life, occasionally coming back to the United States to advocate pan-Africanism. Knowing the background of Carmichael's life before he gave this speech and where his life took him after he gave this speech really helps to put things in perspective. It really gives you a good idea of where he came from and how he got to this point in his life, and what happened later in his life. Knowing Carmichael's background really helped me me to make a new and better interpretation of his speech.

During the course of my research I learned a lot about Stokely Carmichael, the Civil Rights movement, the "Black Power" movement, and many other things. All of these things helped me to better understand the context in which Carmichael wrote his "Black Power" speech, and what it truly meant. Without doing research there was so much that I didn't know about the culture of the time, the audience that it was read to, the reasons it was given, and even about Stokely Carmichael himself. Because of the fact that I didn't know so many things, I also didn't understand the speech as well as I thought. After doing the research and understanding the historical and cultural background in which Carmichael's "Black Power" speech was written, It gave me a whole new perspective on the speech. The research completely changed my interpretation of Carmichael's "Black Power" and helped me to understand it so much better than I did before the research. Reading this speech with little to no prior knowledge was almost like reading blind. Researching the background of this speech really opened my eyes and changed my interpretation of something that I thought I had already understood. 

