Louis Lomax - The Negro Revolt Revisited

Louis Lomax was a civil rights activist who spoke on many college campuses in the mid-1960's. On October 22, 1965, he spoke at the Carleton College weekly convocation in the Skinner Memorial Chapel. It was the most memorable convocation address I heard in 1965-68. Two memorable phrases that I never forgot - not quite correctly - can be found in the audio and the text -

• "The problem with indentured servants was that they lacked SOCIAL VISIBILITY!"
• "Come to church, bring money, and WE'LL TAKE CARE OF IT!"

It sounds like he spent a lot of time in church, because he quotes scripture frequently and speaks in the cadences of great black preachers.

After he reviews the history of Negroes in America, he makes these main points:

• There will be less and less of a race problem and more and more of a class problem.
• The gulf between the haves and the have-not gets wider. That means a rethinking of the American value proposition of work.
• The possibility of automation creates a new heaven and a new earth and a new morality.
• The new ethic is man centered rather than theory centered. The new theology is centered on my brother, and wherever God is, he will show up if I find my brother.

Fortunately the speech was recorded on reel-to-reel magnetic audio tape. Available here:

• mp3 format. I am indebted to Nat Wilson, Carleton's digital archivist, who arranged a conversion from magnetic tape to an mp3 file.
• raw text transcription. Produced using the Iphone app Transcribe, for $5.
• a reformatting of the raw text. This is useful for comparison with the working corrected text to see which changes I made.
• diffs between reformatted raw text and working corrected text.
• the working corrected text transcription. A manual correction produced from the raw transcription by comparing to the mp3 file.
• a cleaned up and reformatted corrected text transcription.
• An html-formatted version. This is intended to be the definitive version. If you spot errors relative to the mp3 file, that can't be characterized as clarifications, let me know.

The New York Times 1619 project inspired me to resurrect this speech:

• articles
• books
• maybe a Hulu stream
• Nikole Hannah-Jones interview

Other political-scrapbook discussions that might be of interest:

• End minority rule
• Fischer's Albion's Seed discussion of streams of British immigration and their enduring effects on American society, politics, and economics
• True tax reform is one flat tax on discretionary income
• Universal basic income and flat tax

More about political scrapbook.

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