Resumo de Speech X - Imamu Amiri Baraka

The September 1970 meeting of the Congress of African Peoples in
Atlanta, Georgia, was one in a growing historical tradition of international
gatherings of Pan Africans, in so-called modern history, beginning
with the four meetings called by W.E.B. Du Bois down to the
Manchester Conference (the fifth Pan Africanist Conference) in 1945,
pulled together by George Padmore and Dubois, in which the phrase Pan Africanism first got put into common circulation. In most
recent times, the Black Power conferences, held in 1966 (Washington,
D.C.), '67 (Newark, N.J.), '68 (Philadelphia, Pa.) were the immediate
forbears, as well as an international meeting in Bermuda in 1969. All
these meetings were part of the same historical and contemporary
dynamic, the movement for international African liberation, which is
Pan-Africanism at its broadest!

The veil of controversy which is thrown over our movement by our
enemies is only to hide the simplicity of what we intend! The Pan
African movement encourages African people wherever they are in
the world to understand that they are brothers and sisters, families,
communities, nations, a race together, bred in common struggle,
brought forth from, and a result of common history, and in the
circulating combustible of our racial memory, we all strive for a
common future; a people united, independent, basing our claim to
national and international sovereignty upon a unified, independent
mother Africa, whose freedom, then, would automatically raise the
level of Africans' lives all over the planet.

The Congress remanifested in contemporary application the ideas
of great Africans like Blyden, Garvey, Du Bois, Casely Hayford,
Nyerere, Nkrumah, Touré, Elijah Muhammud, Malcolm X. But now
we understand the great "synthesis" that men like Hayford spoke of,
the need to combine the views of Africans living on the continent of
Africa with the ideas of Africans living in the West, or wherever
outside the continent, to produce the contemporary African education,

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technology, politics and economic development necessary to
unify and liberate all of us together!

To this 1970 meeting came African men as diverse as Hajj Abdoulaye
Touré, Guinea's Ambassador, and the late Whitney Young,
who just before his death had, like Dr. King before him, begun to see
the need for all black men to work together whatever their smaller
view. The tone of operational unity, which the executive council of the
Congress tries to emphasize, was ubiquitously apparent. Minister
Louis Farrakhan delivered a strong message from the messenger of
Islam, the honorable Elijah Muhammud, to an audience in which was
seated the wife of our slain leader, Malik Shabazz. Julian Bond,
Mayor Hatcher, Imari from the Republic of New Africa, continental
African Liberation Army spokesmen, Breadbasket's Rev. Jesse Jackson,
SCLC's chairman, Rev. Abernathy, newly elected black mayor,
Kenneth Gibson from NewArk, all came and participated and delivered
addresses that fixed the consciousness of all of us and all of them,
at a higher level. The body of thought was high, and the vibrations
of such a gathering are sufficient in themselves to generate whole
epochs of new dynamic movement among Africans.

It is the ideological theme of all the Congress's activities that all
Africans are part of the same racial, cultural, political, historical,
emotional body, and that even though some of us might see the
progress of the whole as being achieved in one way, and others of us
might have more special views, it is still the duty of the body to be
in constant intercommunication one part with the others, or there will
be minimum movement all around. This is the basis of what Maulana
Karenga called "Operational Unity": Unity without Uniformity. It is
this way of thinking that allows the Urban League's National Executive
Director to exchange views frankly with a Minister Farrakhan or
aneth Gibson to reflect on the concepts of more orthodox Pan
Africanists. There is health in such an approach. It is much like the
united liberation front of the Vietnamese people, called "Viet Cong,"
in which all walks of Vietnamese people unite themselves, whether
they are Catholics, or Buddhists, socialists or speak of free enterprise,
unite themselves around ideas which are mutually beneficial to all,
ideas that finally will liberate all. So that like the old Fanti intellectuals,
they can then have "peace" . . . peace in which they can sit and
listen to their own varied counsels, and eventually shape a future
designed to enhance the lives of all Vietnamese.

The exchange of varied blackness, the coupling of seemingly antithetical
approaches to national and international African liberation --
these are the kinds of dynamic that are set up at such a meeting as
the 1970 Congress, just as this spirit has been kept moving at each of
the great Pan African Congresses of the past.

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