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            Leroy Eldridge Cleaver.  “Political Struggle in America,” February 11, 1968.

            Occasion: Speech given at the Peace and Freedom Party Forum.

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Political Struggle in America

1

I think the first thing we have to realize, really get into our minds, is that it is a reality when you hear people say that there’s a “black colony” and a “white mother country.”  I think you really have to get that distinction clear in you minds in order to understand that there are two different sets of political dynamics functioning in this country.  If you don’t make that distinction, then a lot of the activities going on in this country will be non-sensical.  For instance, if there’s a homogeneous country and everyone here is a citizen of that country, when it comes to participating in the politics of this country, it makes a lot of sense to insist that black people participate in electoral politics and all the other forms of politics as we have known them.  But if you accept the analysis that the black colony is separate and distinct from the mother country, then a lot of other forms of political struggle are indicated.

2

I think that most black revolutionaries or militants or what have you have generally accepted this distinction.  A lot of people seem reluctant to accept this distinction.  I know that in your education you were given to believe the melting pot theory, that people have come from all over the world and they’ve been put into this big pot and they’ve been melted into American citizens.  In terms of the white immigrants who came to this country, this is more or less true.  But in this stew that’s been produced by these years and years of stirring the pot, you’ll find that the black elements, the black components have not blended well with the rest of the ingredients.  And this is so because of the forms of oppression that have been generated—black people have been blocked out of this, and blacked out of that, and not allowed to participate in this, and excluded from that.  This has created a psychology in black people where they have now turned all the negative exclusions to their advantage.

3

I mean the same things that were used to our disadvantage are now being turned around to our advantage.  The whole thing about condemning blackness and developing an inferior image of everything black has now been turned around— and not just because of the slogan Black Power.  I think that the slogan of Black Power was a recognition of the change in the psychology of black people, that in fact they have seized upon their blackness and rallied around the elements or the points at which they were oppressed.  They have turned the focal point of the oppression into the focal point for national liberation.

4

Now, when people decide in their own minds that they are going to separate themselves from a country or from a political situation, a lot of dynamics and a lot of directions flow from that basic distinction.  For example, people are going to the United Nations seeking membership in the United Nations for Afro-America.  And when you look at the criteria for nationhood, you’ll find that the only place that black people fall short in terms of this standard is the one where the land question comes up.  They say that a nation is defined as a people sharing a common culture, a common language, a common history, and a common land situation.  Now, that land question was a hang-up for a long time, simply because the black people in this country were dispersed throughout the population of the mother country.  People couldn’t begin to deal with the question of how to build a nation on someone else’s land.  It presents a very sticky problem. 

5

In the history of the liberation struggle in this country, the two outstanding efforts that we remember in history were the Marcus Garvey movement and the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammed.  I consider their fundamental mistake was that they projected goals that they were unable to fulfill.  Marcus Garvey said that he was going to take black people back to Africa.  In fact, he wasn’t in a position to do that, technically speaking in terms of resources.  It falls down to a question of resources, because I think that if Marcus Garvey had been able to come over here with enough ships and enough technical resources, he would have succeeded, because he did have a very tight grip on the minds and imaginations of black people, and he could have had enough of them with him to make his dream a reality.  Elijah Muhammed said that he wanted to have a part of this country, that he would accept some of these states.  Well, the way he approached the question, I think, was sure to doom it to be unfulfilled because he was asking the white power structure to give him several states.  He offered no alternative means of obtaining these states, other than, perhaps, Allah would come down from the sky and give them to us.  Well, black people have been waiting for help to come from abroad and from the sky, from underground, and from anywhere, and it hasn’t come.  So that we began to feel that we were in a bag where nothing could happen.

6

The beautiful thing about the slogan Black Power was that it implemented the dictum laid down by Kwana Nkrumah, in which he said, “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and other things will be added unto you.”  It’s very important to realize that in moving to gain power, you do not conceal or repudiate the land question, you hold it in abeyance.  What you’re saying is that we must first get ourselves organized, and then we can get some of this land.  It’s very important to realized that 29,000,000 people or 30,000,000 people, what have you- we’re going to have to take a count because the government has been lying to us about our number—they lie about everything else they do so we can assume that they are lying about that, so we can say that there might be 30,000,000 or 40,000,000, we might even be a majority, I don’t know; but I am quite sure that there are more than the 20,000,000 that the government wants to give us.  But we can say that it’s possible to organize 20,000,000 or 30,000,000 people right here.  Even though we are dispersed throughout the mother country, it is possible to set up political forms where we can have representative in the full sense of the word, like ambassadors going to other countries.

7

You can see from the experience of Malcolm and from the experience of Stokley that movements around the world are hip enough to the political realities of our situation to recognized and to accept our representatives in every sense of the world.  I mean, Stokley Carmichael, when he went to Havana, received the same respect, or maybe even a little more, as delegates from other countries.  Black people recognized this and they know that there is a way through the international machinery to cope with the situation.

8

I think it’s very important to realize that there is a way to move.  So that today black people are talking about going to the United Nations, asking the United Nations for a UN supervised plebiscite throughout the colony.  Black people have never been able thorough any mechanism to express what their will is.  People have come along and spoken in the name of black people; they have said that black people want to be integrated; they have said that black people want to be separated; but no where at no time have black people been given the chance to register their own position.  I think it’s very important that we decide this once and for all, because if black people we are able to wage a campaign on this subject: do you want to be a part of America, do you want to be integrated into America, or do you want to be separated from America, do you want to be a nation, do you want to have you a people and ambassadors?  I know what the answer wil be.  The battle is on, the shooting has started.

9

The Black liberation forces have Malcolm X who is, like unto John the Baptist, who prophesied the coming of another, Malcolm prophesied that his people were going to pick up the Gun and that it would be the Ballot or the Bullet.  Huey P. Newton is like unto Jesus, in that he fulfilled the prophesy by picking up the Gun.  So that the Black Liberation forces have Huey and the Gun he brought to politics, proving that the Gun is highly political and that Political Power does indeed grow out of the barrel of a Gun.  And, like Lenin, Huey created a Party, an instrument designed to cope with a specific situation at a specific time in the historical process of the development of society.

10

The task of the White Mother Country Radicals is to stop the White Mother Country from making unjust war on the National Liberation forces in the colonies.  PEACE IS THE SLOGAN OF THIS CAUSE.  It is a slogan, not a program.  The White Mother Country Radicals have no program, only slogans.  And they have a strategy based on their slogans. 

11

The role of the White Mother Country Radicals is two-fold: (1) to stop the White Mother Country from making unjust war on the colonial subjects, and (2) to help the colonial subjects mount a resistance—by any means necessary.

12

At the moment, the Exploiters manipulate certain colonial subjects into fighting in its war against the National Liberation forces in Viet Nam.  The Black Colonial subjects who are fighting in Viet Nam are there because the exploiters need them there to hid their racist game.  Pull the Blacks out of the war and the war has to stop, the Exploiters will have to activate a new strategy with new weapons.  The struggle for National Liberation will continue.  How to pull the Blacks out of the war in Viet Nam?  By placing a mandatory summons upon their sense of duty, their loyalty, their patriotism, i.e. by manifesting a need for them to defend their mothers, and father, and sisters, and brothers, and wives, and lover, and children.  By the development of a critical situation at home.  Home is where your heart is.  When the racist Gestapo pigs, who occupy Black Communities in the same manner and for the same purpose that foreign troops occupy territory, begin to shoot down their loved ones in the streets, with Stoner Guns, in Urbanized Tanks, then the Black Troops will say: Hell No, We Won’t Go!  The Black Ghetto is our battlefield!

13

Executive Mandate No. 3 deals with the situation.  It is a Declaration of Independence.  It will be received by the Pigs as a Declaration of War, because they have evil intentions, evil plans, and they need illegal power of the Gestapo in order to carry out their evil plans.  Thus they must have the power to kick down doors for political criminals.  Without that power they are worthless as the Enforcer arm of the Power Structure, of the Exploiters.  The Enforcer arm of the power structure must have unlimited power, unbridled, unchecked, absolute.  Stop the Pigs at any point and that is liberated territory.  Executive Mandate No. 3 declares every home of every black person Liberated Territory.  It is advisory to the Black Colony as a whole and mandatory to the members of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

14

Pigs will continue kicking down doors.  Black Panthers will begin to defend their thresholds.  Fugitives will multiply in the Black Colony, will hid behind more doors, which the Pigs will kick down, and thus the cycle will speed up.”