SCRIPT:
It's only a matter of time. (Pause) The government of this country
wants to break down every kind of group outside of Big Brother, and they're going to be after every group-- it's a miracle of miracles that they haven't come after us, because we would be the
ideal group to come after.
(voice rising)They know we mean it, out of the interest for the survival
of our children, They know we mean it for they have no place to go now.
(voice returning to normal) We either got to go to some
place like Cuba or our Promised Land, which we are going to get out of this
conflict between the capitalists and the socialist world, into a free
socialist territory in the Third World.
(Pause) We have no other alternative, for as of this week, Canada is passing a racial exclusion law
that will not allow any Asiatics, Indians or blacks to immigrate in to
Canada. From the floor of the Congress, the Parliament, and there is no
doubt that it will pass. Now you people, wake up, by God. (Pause) Now I mean
it. (Pause) Thank you. (Pause) The Indians in Ottawa are under such
oppression in Canada tonight that they are talking-
They are contemplating putting -- seriously -- all Indians, all people
of color, black, in-- in membership in the NAACP, into detention centers, in
Canada. It's already in England. England has gone to pieces. Read today's
Chronicle. England is without morale, it said. It's-- out-- without morale,
it's without moral fervor, it's without principle. The country's about to
divide. Scotland's about to secede from Great Britain, it been with them for
thousands of-- hundreds of years. The Irish, of course, are killing the
Irish. As I've told you repeatedly, we must stick together for survival.
They want the poor to start a war amongst themselves. Because with this mass production, they
don't need poor workers anymore. So they want to do
away with a lot of the poor people, and there's no better way to do away
with them than to start a race war between black and poor whites, and that
will kill them off, just like they killed them off in Vietnam, for a long
time. (Self-evident tone) They killed us all off in Vietnam. Thirty-seven
percent of our people that died over there were black, yet only 10% of the
population is supposed to be black. (Pause) You say, I didn't come here to
hear about that-- No. You came here thinking this was another church, some of
you. You thought you'd be lied to, just like your preachers lied to you.
I've come to save you. I've come to save you, not from sin, but from the
sinners, (cries out) the honkies that have sinned against you.
(voice normalising)Conditions are
bad, you cannot even get the plight of the black man's job
situation into the newspaper. We're gonna have to get some of these
newspapers, get control of them, because most black papers are actually
owned by white people and fronted by black people, and you can't even get
what's going on, the starvation, the-- the joblessness, the terror
that's happening to black people, the-- the experimentation that's being done
on them in prisons already, you cannot get it into the newspaper,
because they won't print it. Even the Washington Post, which is
suppo-- supposedly the best paper in the nation, would not even print the
findings of the terror of what's happening to black and Indian people and
poor white people in this country. Wouldn't even print it.
(Pause) 'Cause it'll come to fascism here. They're gonna put us in concentration
camps. We gotta do something. There's nothing we can do, but get ourselves together to make a
demonstration for the revolution, to be quiet and keep ourselves in limbo,
or get ourselves to the Promised Land for training, or get somewhere. There
is nothing for us to do. The people are asleep. Just like they are in this
room, they are asleep. They don't give a damn, racism is at the heart of
this nation, and the moment we have much more joblessness, it will not be
safe for you to walk from your store, as a black American, or a person who
associates with people of color, it will not be safe for you to go from your
store to your home. (Pause) When they've got to have the National Guard in
the city of Boston, the seat of democracy, where the Plymouth Rock-- (Pause)
All those lovely Puritans settled, because they wanted freedom for everyone,
and now the very place that started freedom for everyone makes it unsafe for
black people-- they said tonight over the news, not a black person's safe in
South Boston. They don't even go into South Boston. It's not safe. (Pause)
And you've seen nothing yet. So if-- for that reason alone should be why
we're here. But it isn't.
(The Jonestown Reenactment wishes to credit Rebecca Moore and Fielding M. McGehee III for transcriptions of many of the segments used here.)