These students were the shock troops of the civil rights movement, and many suffered from the trauma induced by a region and a country reluctant to change. They had already confronted the brutality of the South in an effort to desegregate lunch counters and to register black people to vote. Everyone understood the burden the students carried on their shoulders. "Our older brothers reasoned with us like family," Carmichael, who would become known as Kwame Ture, later recalled. The impromptu rap session went on until sunrise. "We must tell the truth till we can no longer bear it."Īfter the symposium ended, Baldwin and two other speakers joined a group of students in the small, cramped apartment of a few NAG members. to tell us what really happened to get us where we are now," he boldly declared from the stage at Howard. "It is the responsibility of the Negro writer to excavate the real history of this country. He was a captivating speaker, with a powerful, almost hypnotic cadence if the desire to be a preacher had long ago left him, his ability to hold a crowd in his hand had not.
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