Justice & Law Quote by Stokely Carmichael

Blame, Carmichael is saying, is a choice - and Washington keeps choosing the wrong target. The line is built like a courtroom rebuttal: not this, not that, not them. Each clause pulls another popular scapegoat off the shelf: Black Power as a boogeyman, SNCC as the convenient villain, urban rebellions as an alibi. The repetition works as political judo, flipping the accusation back onto the people who benefit from delay. If a civil rights bill fails, it’s not because Black activists became too loud; it’s because power decided not to move.

The intent is tactical and unsentimental. Carmichael isn’t trying to reassure nervous liberals that everything will stay polite. He’s refusing the respectability trap where Black movements must perform innocence in order to deserve basic rights. By naming SNCC and the uprisings in “major cities,” he signals the mid-1960s pivot point: the moment when nonviolence, legislative incrementalism, and interracial coalition politics were colliding with the reality of police violence, Northern segregation, and exhausted patience.

The subtext bites: if lawmakers only act when activists are quiet, then “progress” is just a reward system for obedience. Carmichael is also protecting movement agency. Black Power didn’t create backlash; backlash was already there, waiting for a pretext. His sentence strips away the comforting myth that injustice is merely a reaction to protest tactics. It’s a structure - and the bill is failing because that structure is doing exactly what it was built to do.