Reflecting on a fragment of a Kwame Ture Speech
Kwame Ture speech :Lessons from the 60s. Filmed at the University of Chicago on February 18th, 1989. Trans. By EP, Segment starts at ~4 minutes 55 seconds mark
In reference to the 1989 Miami Riot
“In Miami we're oppressed just like we're everywhere else. But we wait until an outside force provokes us into action. Everywhere you will see us, there's always an outside force that provokes the African masses into action, even on the campus here. I told some brothers the other day, “You want to organize all the African students on the campus? I can do it overnight. All I got to do is write a filthy sign, derogatory against them, put it on the campus and the next day they all come to me.”
And one of the errors that must be corrected: a people struggling for freedom cannot depend upon an external force to push them into motion. They must have an internal dynamism of their own. Consequently the African masses in drawing lessons from the 60s must completely understand it. They must have a dynamism in their hands that tells them when to attack the enemy, how to attack the enemy, and where to carry their struggle. The 60s must come to be qualified from a mobilized struggle to an organized struggle. We say they fight like animals. If you back an animal up against the wall, and the animal even a rabbit will come out striking at you until you back up. Those Africans once provoked come out striking wildly, as they do in Miami, the police retreat, give them some concessions, they sit down and then the police comes back with more repression.
None of the gains made by a mobilized people can be maintained; those of only an organized people who can make gains can use those gains to further their struggle.”
EP’s take:
Kwame Ture focuses on:
Power comes from people rather than just trying to individually hold people in power accountable
Need to build durable institutions, organizations to outlive us
Challenge to learn about how organizations behave rather than just "being right"
Learn about how organizations function, how people outside of it work
Overall:since feelings can be feeling, organizations/institutions are needed to crystallize it
Danny’s take:
Even though I was born inside of 410, I was completely ignorant of the course of San Antonio’s development and the social movements it engendered up until around 2 years ago. The plasticky triumphalism of city boosterism claiming that segregation came to a close with a friendly business deal seemed to just be a factoid representative of this city being the permanently sleepy older brother of Austin. I was really just accepting the appearance of an interregnum as a transhistorical phenomena. Many such cases!
Stumbling upon Mike Davis’ classic City of Quartz (on LA) at last gave me the kick to examine our own city’s 20th century history to look towards the future and skewer our boosters.
Processing a century of history has made me shed some of my cynicism, or at least historically ground it, leading the statement of “nothing ever happens” to morph into the lines of inquiry of “What is the character of existing organization and what forces are boiling outside of it?” and “What is required for the relationships of care, commiseration and political orientation found within those forces to cohere into mass citywide sentiments and networks?”
Let us take for example the steady work of DSA’s immigration committee which has undertaken the task of canvassing people in homes and businesses about the ICE presence here, from state kidnappings to the failed warehouse turned detention center expected to come online in 2027, and finally to their rights and how to report immigration enforcement sightings to the hotline. Through this activity people gain a dual sense that this problem isn’t some far off battle being fought in the Los Angeleses, Chicagos and Minneapolises of the country, and also that they aren’t alone here in wanting for something to change. At what point do those senses advance and become self germinating, outside of activist-canvassers and those directly reached by canvassing? Instead becoming the logical conclusion of a networked self defence to those being ground in the charnel house of distribution hub, construction and whataburger crew, those who see the least of state intervention in their favor amidst the climate of the state being stripped to its repressive core.
There is struggle everywhere across this country, developing unevenly but never completely absent. Post war sprawl and regimes of labor discipline in San Antonio’s job sectors isolated and dampened organization, yet remained saddled with a concomitant difficulty in people meeting their needs in this sort of city that once prompted widely penetrating social engagement and may bring about its undoing in our time. Unemployment and unaffordability, those ever present poltergeists of the profit motive have long plagued even this city premised on just building homes, industrial sites and transportation hubs further afield to hide the degradation of human lives. Long crises of humanity meet crises of governments and companies running headlong into the debts they have accrued in heady casino run years. Like it or not the drainage, road, power grid, water supply and “public safety” maintenance chickens of TxDOT, Bexar County and COSA are coming home to roost. Sclerotic industry already premised on tax abatements and low wages cannot long stand the gale.
I’m not trying to confidently augur the fall of Babylon, this is just the terrain we inhabit. Things could very well end up as a surveillance state ruling a land of decaying asphalt for centuries. It’s up to us all, whether friend, fellow traveler or stranger to keep abreast of the situation and fight for the expansion of new worlds based on looking out for one another.
