The following press statement was issued on August 7th by Bernard Heaney, chairman of the National Association of Labour Student Organisations, on behalf of that organisation: N.A.L.S.0. deplores the decision of the Home Office to exclude Mr. Stokely Carmichael from the United Kingdom on the grounds that Mr. Carmichael holds views inimicable to those of the British Government and exercises his right to propagate them. It is not Mr. Carmichael or the militant advocates of Black Power who bear the responsibility for the recent outbreaks of violence in the cities of North America, It is the society which isolates a people, systematically degrades and exploits them, and hides its failings in the flabby rhetoric of the ‘Great Society' which bears the total guilt for the incipient civil war which threatens the United States, Driven North by the relentless pressure of mechanisation, and the Southern Bourbons the Negro is crowded into substandard urban accommodation in the crumbling hearts of the cities, where his lack of education, and increasing automation rob him of any chance of improving his position. These pressures are growing, and with them the hope of emancipation through the last desperate attack on privilege and exploitation. Black Power is the legitimate child of the ghettoes and the slum tenements and its spokesmen are the leaders of the American Negro, Compromise has failed, but the threat of Watts, Newark and Detroit in every state of the Union will give an edge of iron to the Civil Rights struggle, The reaction of the British Government in banning Stokely Carmichael from Britain expresses not only their usual subservience to the U.S. State Department's desire to silence every critic of its racialist policies, but the fear that Carmichael's activities among British Negroes will encourage them to take up a more militant struggle against racism here. Despite the desperate efforts of the Wilson Government to appear to be combating racialism in Britain they have been forced through the logic of their position over Vietnam and the struggle of oppressed peoples everywhere, to strengthen the racialist immigration laws passed in 1962 by a Conservative government, By pursuing this course of action they have given encouragement to those who would wish to see Negroes expelled from Britain in large numbers. Since Stokely Carmichael's visit to Britain the demand for a total ban on Negro immigration, and the ‘repatriation! of those now living in Britain have again been raised. Part of this witchhunt is expressed in the vicious attacks mounted in the press against Michael X, the well known Black Nationalist. N.A.L.S.0. reaffirms its fraternal solidarity with all Negro organisations in Britain fighting against the racialist policies of the Wilson Government, and with similar student and Civil Rights groups risking their lives in the fight for racial equality in the United States.
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