We must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody his freedom. As Carmichael put it at the time, “We were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy. It was a watershed moment: Carmichael, in his “Black Power” message, was breaking with Martin Luther King Jr.’s mantra of nonviolence. From now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell them.” That’s all we’ve been doing, begging and begging. “We have begged the president,” Carmichael said. “What we are going to start saying now is ‘Black Power!’” The demand tore through the air like lightning. “We have been saying ‘Freedom’ for six years,” Carmichael declared in a thundering voice. Meredith, who had earlier integrated the University of Mississippi, survived, and the protesters were going to march for him. On the night of the 16th, Carmichael addressed a crowd of some 600 people gathered in a park in Greenwood to protest the shooting ten days before of the activist James Meredith, ambushed in Hernando while marching in support of voter registration. Just 25 years old, a Howard University philosophy major who turned down a postgraduate scholarship at Harvard to become a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he was already a prominent voice in the movement. Stokely Carmichael had already served 49 days inside a Mississippi prison farm for nonviolent civil rights activism when he returned to the state in June of 1966.
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