"Everybody in the black community must organize, and then we decide whether we will have alliance with other people or not, but not until we are organized"
About this Quote
Power doesn’t trickle in through goodwill; it’s built like infrastructure. H. Rap Brown’s line is blunt on purpose, a piece of movement engineering disguised as a warning. The first clause, “Everybody in the black community must organize,” isn’t inspirational rhetoric, it’s a demand for intent and discipline: stop treating politics as a mood and start treating it as leverage. Brown is speaking from the late-1960s ecosystem of Black Power and SNCC-era impatience, when “integration” often translated into being invited into rooms where decisions had already been made.
The subtext is a critique of dependency. Alliances can be moral, strategic, and necessary, but Brown argues they’re also structurally asymmetrical when one side arrives fragmented. “And then we decide whether we will have alliance…” shifts agency from reactive coalition-building to deliberative choice. It’s not anti-coalition; it’s anti-coalition as a substitute for self-determination. The “we decide” matters as much as the “whether”: he’s insisting on collective decision-making, not individual gatekeeping or elite spokesmanship.
The final sting - “but not until we are organized” - reads like a refusal to be rushed into symbolic unity. Brown is naming a common trap of American liberal politics: urging marginalized groups to build broad harmony before they’ve built internal power. Organizing, in his framing, is what turns solidarity into a contract rather than a favor. The line works because it’s less a slogan than a sequencing argument: community cohesion first, partnerships second, otherwise “alliance” becomes another word for absorption.
The subtext is a critique of dependency. Alliances can be moral, strategic, and necessary, but Brown argues they’re also structurally asymmetrical when one side arrives fragmented. “And then we decide whether we will have alliance…” shifts agency from reactive coalition-building to deliberative choice. It’s not anti-coalition; it’s anti-coalition as a substitute for self-determination. The “we decide” matters as much as the “whether”: he’s insisting on collective decision-making, not individual gatekeeping or elite spokesmanship.
The final sting - “but not until we are organized” - reads like a refusal to be rushed into symbolic unity. Brown is naming a common trap of American liberal politics: urging marginalized groups to build broad harmony before they’ve built internal power. Organizing, in his framing, is what turns solidarity into a contract rather than a favor. The line works because it’s less a slogan than a sequencing argument: community cohesion first, partnerships second, otherwise “alliance” becomes another word for absorption.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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