Talib Kweli: Self
Quotes
-
Talib Kweli : The next thing is um... when he was burning the flame he said, 'This is for the FBI.' And, he was, maybe, a fiery speaker and had... had passionate ideas, but he was a calm, cool, collected person. And so, he's singing about; 'this is for the FBI'; but it's just words. It's just song and words. A few years ago, I was listening to Stokley Carmichael speeches while I was preparing for a new record I was working on, and umm... it was shortly after 9/11 in America. I was making a reservation on JetBlue airlines to fly to California. Uhh... when I got to the airport, the FBI, the CIA, the TSA; they came and intercepted me. All these guys in black suits. And they took me in a back room and started questioning me about the Stokley Carmichael speech that I was listening to. They probably, you know, have some sort of bug, or some sort of tap or something... But, umm... they were very concerned with me listening to this Stokley Carmichael speech from 1967. You know? Forty years ago. So, words that he said forty... now, we have gangsta rappers - we have rappers who talk about shooting other people all the time; killing... but the FBI's not looking for them. They're looking at me because I'm listening to this speech from forty years ago. And it shows you the power of those words, is that they resonate even to now. The FBI is still scared of this man. He doesn't have nearly the same influence over our community as he did then, but yet, they still stopped me at the airport for listening to his speech.
-
Talib Kweli : And then the other thing I noticed was... when you see images of Stokely, you only see the speeches. This is the first time I've seen something where he's with... just hanging out with white people. Hanging out with his mother. And he just seemed like a regular dude. And that's what you don't realize about these people, is that; none of these people are evil or bad or even extra violent... it's just; to them common sense meant that they had to speak and stand up for themselves. So, all you see is this image of them standing up for themselves. So, it makes you think that they're like that all the time, but he just was a regular dude. And that's what I got from that footage with his mom.
-
Talib Kweli : Okay. The first thing that crossed my mind with Stokley is , um... y'know he has... he has so much power and passion and fire inside of him. And he understood what his job was very early. And he understood why, even though the things he was saying were in direct opposition to the philosophy of Dr. King; he understood that Dr. King was still important. He understood the compassion. Umm... what struck me though as interesting that... from his vantage point, non-violence and passive resistance was a non-option. It wasn't an option at all. Now, in 2010, you can see how King and all of them who were influenced by Ghandi; how it did work, you know? The passive resistance of the bus boycott... it did work. But it would have never worked without people like Stokley Carmichael on the other side of him. They studied the passive resistance. He studied power and what power meant. He was the first one to really talk about black power. But, I mean, that's exactly what was missing from the equation; the power. And he was powerful just from... the speaking, and he wasn't even like the Panthers. You know, the Panthers were very influenced by him. But, it's not like he was in the street with some guns, you know?
