
The Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Stokely Carmichael, was known for bringing about the term “Black Power”. This term became popular when he gave his famous speech at UC Berkley in October of 1966, to a crowd of mostly all whites. In the beginning of Carmichael’s speech, he introduces the unfair treatment of African Americans by saying that “it is a mistaken belief that white people can give anybody their freedom” and that “a man is born free” (314). He then goes to say, “only after a man is born free, can he be enslaved and that is what the country is doing” (315). He uses this to lead into the topic of the Civil Rights bill and how it was created for the whites, not the African Americans. It was the whites who would not allow the blacks to do things that they should be allowed to do as a free man of the United States. Therefore, a bill had to be passed to inform the white people that it was acceptable for African Americans to do certain things. The next topic he introduces is white supremacy. Carmichael says that the whites believe they have power over everything and they have made it legitimate. If one was black, they were automatically inferior in the white’s eyes. So he says, “it is the African Americans jobs to make their actions and their rebellions legitimate to reach equality” (318). Throughout his whole speech, Carmichael was very straight forward and made his opinion clear that the African Americans had to unite to reach this equality, and they tried doing so by acting against the whites. When African Americans finally started to protest against the whites, the whites had an uproar saying that the African American’s were being violent. Carmichael says that violence did not become an issue to the whites though, until the African Americans started being violent towards them. The whites saw their acts as only a way to show the African Americans that they were so called “superior” over them. Through the three articles, which I will speak of below, one can see that the whites were indeed violent to the African Americans, despite their opposing opinion, but were infuriated when the African Americans acted back with the same attitude as Carmichael said. 

 The Ku Klux Klan was a white supremacist organization, and was considered to be the most hate-based organization in the history of America. The KKK strongly opposed African Americans being included in the Civil Rights. The Ku Klux Klan was intentionally made to express hate towards the African Americans through words and actions. This group began to form in 1915 when a man named William J. Simmons led a group of 34 men on a trip to Stone Mountain, who were all once a part of a former Klan. During this trip, this group of men established the second Klan. In just a few weeks following the establishment of this new Klan, 91 new members had joined. By 1924, the Klan had reached to about 3 million members. The number of members fluctuated tremendously after this; however, their hate against African American’s never changed. This organization was the most popular in the 1920’s, the 1950’s, and the 1960’s. The hatred they had for African Americans were shown through the many actions they partook in against the African Americans. One instance of this is, on September 1963, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed while a Sunday school class was going on. Members of the Ku Klux organization were the ones behind the bombing of this African American church. In addition to the deaths of the four young girls, many were injured. This caused an uproar throughout the African American race. When large groups of blacks began to protest against the KKK, and the bombing of the church, whites became infuriated that the blacks were invading their town and displaying so much hatred towards them. 

Despite the acts of discrimination committed by the KKK prior to Carmichael’s speech, these acts of discrimination are still shown today, except through individuals and law enforcement. One instance of this occurred on February 12, 2012. On this day, 911 received a call from a man of the name George Zimmerman. During this phone call, he reported “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about”. Moments after this phone call, Zimmerman shot Treyvon Martin, they guy who Zimmerman called 911 about. Another instance of this racial discrimination through an individual of law enforcement happened in 2006. After a murder in Washington D.C. in July of 2006, the acting commander of the city’s second district, Andy Solberg, told the residents of Georgetown to report anything suspicious, AKA, the sightings of any African Americans. There were several other instances of African Americans being shot by whites, but those are some of the most well-known instances. These shootings upset the African American race, so of course, they protested against these shootings. When protesting against these many shootings, they would flood towns all over America and display their disappointment in sever ways; such as, blocking interstates, destroying buildings, and trashing the towns. The African Americans were quickly called out by the Whites for being violent. However, many whites saw no wrong doing in the violent actions taken upon the innocent African Americans lives who were lost.  

The manual labor that I mentioned above was known as “slavery”, a system in which African Americans that were entitled to freedom by law, were forced to work for white masters on their property. Landowners such as George Washington argued that without constant labor, they would be “ruined by idleness”. Years later, the thirteenth amendment came into effect. This stated that slavery was prohibited unless one was convicted of a crime, and they would then be punished by becoming a slave. Law officers quickly tried to turn as many as the freed African Americans into criminals as they could. The number of blacks in prisons increased dramatically after the thirteenth amendment and yet again, they were forced to do hard and long manual labor.  Some of this labor consisted of doing dangerous jobs in factories, building railroads, and digging in mines. Douglas Blackmon, the author of Slavery By Another Name, described it as “a system in which groups of free men who were guilty of no crimes and entitled to freedom by law, were forced to perform manual labor by the commands of the White masters”. Many of the slaves would try to escape or refuse to work, but when they did so, they were executed by the whites with no question. When African Americans begin to revolt against slavery, the whites once again became infuriated that the African Americans were showing violence due to them being upset, so they executed several African Americans that were apart of these revolts.

As you can see, discrimination against the African American’s used to be a big issue and still remains an issue today; although it is not as severe today as it was at the time that Carmichael gave his famous speech. Carmichael’s whole speech was about the superiority that the whites thought to have over the African Americans, and used many instances to support this idea. One of the many instances that Carmichael used to support this was that when the Whites wanted to show that they were so called superior over the African Americans, they did so in violent manners. This then lead to violent protests by the African Americans. When the African Americans acted against the whites in such a way, the whites became infuriated and focused in on the fact that the African Americans were being so violent. This unfairness is seen through many historical events such as the KKK, the bombing of an African American church, the shooting of Treyvon Martin, and the enslavement of African Americans. In response to these events by the African Americans, they mainly formed large groups of protestors or in the case of slavery, sometimes refused to do work for the Whites. All in all, the whites did in fact commit many acts of violence, but only thought of violence to be an issue with the African American’s were violent back to them.  
